


Stars and Garters

by thebasement_archivist



Category: Highlander - All Media Types, The X-Files
Genre: Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-02-15
Updated: 2001-02-15
Packaged: 2018-11-20 20:00:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11342250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebasement_archivist/pseuds/thebasement_archivist
Summary: Cory relates the tale of getting his fondest wish answered the night he ran into a certain familiar-looking stranger in the wilds of Virginia





	Stars and Garters

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Basement](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Basement), which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Basement's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thebasement/profile).

 

Stars and Garters by Garnet

AUTHOR: Garnet  
PAIRING: Cory Raines/Krycek  
RATING: NC-17  
SERIES: Sequel to "Jumpstart"  
FEEDBACK: Okely dokely (to quote Ned Flanders)...   
ARCHIVE: Yah, sure to RatB, basement, Nickzone & anyone else who dares ask  
DISCLAIMER: Don't own either of them. Too bad. Would be nice... some of the time anyway.  
SUMMARY: Cory relates the tale of getting his fondest wish answered the night he ran into a certain familiar-looking stranger in the wilds of Virginia  
WARNINGS: Cory's still kinda kinky about what turns him on, otherwise I can't think of any other real warnings.  
SPOILERS: Probably bits of anything up to Tunguska/Terma for Krycek, but only hints, him being close mouthed and all.  
COMMENTS: Previously published in "Dark Fantases 7" (Sorry, I think I oopsed when I previously said "Jumpstart" was in #8) put out by Maverick Press.

* * *

Stars and Garters  
An X-Files/Highlander (Cory Raines) crossover  
Sequel to "Jumpstart"  
by Garnet

Come on in, will ya? Close the door. You can strip off right over there, if you like. There's lots of extra towels and even some spare suits if that's what you'd prefer. Whatever you're comfortable with. I don't mind if you don't mind. Just climb on in when you're ready and get yourself comfy and let me tell you a little story while the champagne is cooling.

I won't bother to change the names in it--'cause no one involved was exactly innocent--but as for the rest... well, let's just say some of the involved parties are awful damn good liars and some kinda outright lousy at it, and the rest don't know what the hell to believe, so what does it really matter to them?

There's this guy, see, and he works for the FBI. And this other guy and he used to work for the FBI. Kinda sorta. You see, he really worked for this other guy on the side, a real mean old sucker, and was just pretending to be an honest and upright man of the law. He'd never ever really been on the side of angels, I figure, but he musta been pretty good at pulling it off, 'cause he certainly fooled the first guy. And that guy he got really pissed off for being screwed over and lied to like that. Really pissed off.

And this second guy, well, he got a hold of some super secret tape that everybody seemed to want and got on the outs with his old boss over it and then he kinda disappeared for a while. Can't blame em. Everyone wanted a piece of him, and I don't mean in a nice way. Well, mostly.

Anyway... the water too hot for ya? Want me to turn it down some? No? Okay, then.

Anyway, that's when it gets kinda weird. Weird in a good way. Well, I'd say anyhow. But, then, I like weird. Weird's what makes the world go round. Well, that and Calvin Klein and Bill Gates and Coca Cola. Classic, not new Coke, anyways. And money can certainly grease the wheel up for you, always has, but... where was I? Oh, yeah, this guy. See, funny thing is, he looked just like me. I know. Pretty weird, huh? And you'd always thought I was one of a kind. Probably hoped I was, too. Right up there with wishing sometimes that I'd fuck up and lose my head one of these days.

No? Well, that's real magnanimous of you. Even if you're just saying it to keep me off guard, that kinda thing, and don't really mean a bit of it.

Which, incidentally, was what I got when the first guy--the real FBI guy--mistook me for the one who'd fucked him over so bad. Oh, not at first, of course. He was kinda nasty, at first. Beat me around a little, stuck his gun in my face. Kept me in handcuffs and in constant fear of my life. Not that he could know how insignificant a threat that really was. And, well, you know me... I played along with it. Had nothing better to do that day, after all.

And then I realized that he had a thing for my better half... yeah, you heard me. I'm not the only pervert around, mortal or Immortal. Though mister I-don't-know-if-I-should-kill-em-or-fuck-em ranks right up there with the best. In more ways than one. And I went with it. Or got him to go with it. Which amounted to the same thing in the end.

No snide comments, please.

I've already heard em all.

So, let's just say I certainly got my rocks off that night. And he got his. Even if I wasn't really what he wanted. Or who he wanted, for that matter. Which he figured out soon after the glow had melted off the after. So I gave him a kind of post-coital confession. At gun point, I have to tell you. No, I'm not your buddy and never heard of em and, oh by the way, yeah, you're really one hot ticket and you can punch me any...

What? Okay. Yeah, I did tell him more than I shoulda. Can't resist a man who's just fucked me through the sheets. And, yeah, I did tell em about that little quirk of ours, okay? I know I'm not supposed to, but since he didn't much believe me anyway who gives a shit. Fuck, he'd already figured out I wasn't just your everyday ordinary kind of guy. Did I mention how smart he was? Still, my confession kinda tossed him a bit further off the deep end. And not being who he thought I was really toasted his banana. Went completely no fun. All of which made me decide to ditch his ass at the next best opportunity.

Which I did.

And that woulda been that, if I hadn't decided to check out the merchandise at an old time car show while passing through Virginia. See, they were having a kind of gun collector/survivalist convention thing at the same time one town over and the motels and bars were full of em both all around and I happened to wander into this one bar late one night and...

Yeah, go ahead. Pour yourself a glass. I'll take one, too, while you're at it. Might not be cold enough, yet, but if you're thirsty enough...

I wasn't drinking champagne that night, that's for sure. The only wine they had was the kind in big jugs and the whiskey all came with names like Old Dog and clearly tasted of what they were named after and I've always hated beer, so I was having some of what they were selling under the table, if you know what I mean. Clear and sharp as glass and makes you feel just about as brittle come the next morning.

Now, he was drinking beer.

They were back at a table in one of the darker corners--not that the whole damn place wasn't darker and tighter than a miser's purse--and he was sitting with his back to the wall and looking around over his glass with such a nonchalant air that most folks probably never knew he was looking at em, let alone watching them. Watching all the doors, too. And everyone who came in through em.

It was a nine-days-wonder that he hadn't noticed me right off. But then I'd situated myself at another small corner table and had a rather nice-looking redhead between us and I think he was looking around for trouble, not titillation. His buddies, on the other hand, were trouble. They were either in jeans and t-shirts or pseudo military gear, with odd bits of camo scattered here and there, and were drinking too hard and scowling too much and generally and obviously not there to soak up the atmosphere. It was a full moon tonight, though, so I guess it takes all kinds.

He was wearing jeans, too. Black, with a matching black leather jacket and a white t-shirt that seemed to almost be floating between the two. His hair was short. Too damn short to be flattering, and made me wonder who'd sold him on the convenience of a buzzcut. Probably one of his no-neck beer-swilling friends. The kind that still thought that war was a fun game to get into and can anyone play. Rah, rah, wave the flag and all that.

Though, considering the crew around here, that was probably rah, rah, and blow up ye old federal tax collector's office and all six surrounding stories while you're at it. In-between, digging your bunker a new rumpus room and loading up on all those dehydrated little goodies for the day the world ends or the government falls or they come and try to pry your guns free of your cold dead fingers.

Buncha damn fools, if you ask me. If you really believe in all that shit, why not make sure of having a good time before the proverbial final bell? Before Judgment Day arrives with all its bells and whistles and God thins out the herd. Far better checking out in a blaze of glory, than hiding in some hole in the ground and thinking canned beans and Tang will get you through a nuclear winter or the rapture or some such thing.

Mortals. Gotta love em.

As much and as many as possible.

Well, there he was and there I was and I figured this was a chance to get to know myself in a way that I just couldn't pass up.

Oh, shut up, and either hand that bottle over or pour me out another glass. It's not like it's any surprise to you. I've never been exactly bashful about anything, let alone my depravity. And I sincerely doubt anything I could do could actually surprise you after all this time. Appall and disgust, maybe, but not surprise. And, okay, that's a lie, but it sure sounded nice, didn't it? Keeps you in your good light.

So, anyway, when he finally put that beer down and nodded at his buds and began heading towards the gent's room at the back, I set my own glass down and made my apologies to my lady friend. And I followed him inside.

Suspicious bastard that he was, though, he copped on to that fact just a few seconds after I walked into the room. Even before he'd got a chance to see my face. His face. Whatever.

He had me slammed up against the nearest wall and a snub-nosed little gun pressed under my chin quicker than you could skin a sword. Even yours, boyo. Not that I had my sword with me. Couldn't exactly hide it under what I was wearing. Did I mention it had been a hot day and the bar was jammed and he was sweating damn near as much as me--more, maybe, with that jacket on--and the first thought I had as he held me there and almost killed me was how much I wanted to lick those droplets right up off of him. See if he tasted the same as well as looked the same. Well, get my first taste, anyway.

I started to say something--didn't know what, but it would have been good, you can imagine--but something in his eyes flickered and then he eased up on me minutely, before slamming me back again. Harder than before. Holding me there with the gun alone now, as he fumbled in his pocket of his jacket and withdrew something silvery and thin. Something that he held up in front of me and that abruptly grew even more silvery and thin as a long narrow blade popped out the other end. Making it look like a futuristic kinda ice pick. Though, I doubted you could pick this baby up in even the most hip of department stores.

I don't know what he expected from me about then, but certainly not the smile that he got. Not that he stayed confused for very long. Gotta give him that, even if he did have the worst haircut on the planet and a hankering for cheap beer.

"What the fuck do you want?" he asked me.

"What does anybody want," I replied. I would have shrugged, if I didn't think it would have gotten me instantly shot or stabbed. "A great stock portfolio? World peace? A good time?"

He ignored my brilliant repartee. If anything, his expression hardened even further.

"Who sent you?" he added. "Did he send you?"

I could say some vicious little imp almost the same exact shade as his eyes and mine made me do it, but it'd be a lie. "Who he? The man with the smokes and no sense of humor or your own furious little Fed, Fox William Mulder."

You see, I'd done some research since I'd first met up with FBI in our romantic little trysting place, some local morgue, all of which had made me more curious about both him and my friendly double. Not that I don't know what curiosity did to the cat, but I figure I have more lives than sense anyway.

Or so, you're always telling me. What, did you think I was deaf? Fuck, I'm just selective. In a lot of ways.

A characteristic that the guy facing me seemed to share. The only word he reacted to in that last was the name "Mulder." For which, I couldn't exactly blame him. I had reacted to the man, myself. In a big way.

"Mulder," he said softly, though his tone wasn't gentle in the least. A little breathy and a bit husky, but not gentle. "What the fuck do you have to do with him?"

I raised an eyebrow. "You expect me to kiss and tell? C'mon. You know better than that. Or you should."

Those green eyes just glittered and he brought the ice pick up closer to my face. Rather too uncomfortably near my own left eye. "Fine. You tell the old man I've still got what he wants. You tell him to leave me the fuck alone or I won't be the only one who has it, though. It'll make headlines all over the world. Every last one of their secrets on talk shows across America. All his fucking secrets. And yours."

"Mine?" I couldn't help but ask. "You think you really know my secrets?"

"I know what you want here from us, you hybrid shits," he grated out. "And I know how to kill you. I will kill you."

For a moment, I almost believed him. That it was Immortals he was talking about, rather than something else entirely. Rather than more of that off-the-wall shit that his FBI ex-partner had been going on about when I'd first met him. I wouldn't put it past FBI to have relayed to him some bizarre story--cooked up half from the little I'd told him and half from the insanely tangled threads of his own brain--but, somehow, I doubted that Mulder had even seen this guy since we'd last met, let alone spilled the beans about what had happened. I got the strong and strange feeling these two didn't talk all that much. Whether they did anything else together, well, that was still to be tested.

But the point of that ice pick had settled fractionally harder on the fragile skin of my upper cheek, a tiny sharp prick of pain. "If you think wearing my face will stop me..." He hissed, then faded off.

I held myself perfectly still. Not even blinking. "I'm not a shapeshifter, if that's what you think. Or a clone or a hybrid or anything else like that. And I certainly don't work for your 'old man.' Though I think I've met him. Hell, he pretty much tried to off me in your name. Which, maybe, makes it that you owe me. An explanation, if nothing else. Our mutual Feeb friend, Mulder, was a bit short on that regard. But, then, he thought I was you, too. For a while. And, somehow, he just didn't take kindly to that."

He studied me--not believing, but not disbelieving, either. Wary. Hard. On edge. I could see it would be no big deal for him to kill me, that's for sure. It made me wonder if there was anything even approximating a sense of humor left buried in there, at all. Of curiosity or kindness or consideration. A sense of anything other than desperation. He fairly reeked of it. Just like this small room reeked of beer and other even less savory things. Kinda reminded me of the public houses of old.

"What are you then?" he finally demanded, then snorted slightly. "My long lost brother? Shit."

I risked the sensitive skin under my eye with a slight smile. "Long lost ancestor, maybe. But no, I..."

The bathroom door abruptly opened and he immediately backed away from me, both gun and ice pick vanishing from sight at the same exact time. A big guy with a greying beard and a scruffy pair of jeans and an even scruffier red Harley Davidson t-shirt walked past him and, somehow, he managed to keep an eye on both of us at the same time. The new guy just ignored us, however, as he unzipped in front of the nearest urinal and let fly. Belched a half second later, adding to the less than pleasant miasma in the room.

Quite deliberately, as if it were no big deal, I turned my back on my dark twin and went to the closest sink. I began washing my hands thoroughly and dedicatedly, treating it as if it were the most important thing in the world. Keeping my head bowed. Making myself less of a threat. Though, I doubted he'd take the bait, no matter how lovely the packaging.

Scruffy guy seemed to take a long time, but he finally finished up, shook himself off, and wandered out again. Not stopping to wash his own hands. Hardly even glancing up. As if completely oblivious to the tension in the room, to the tension between the two of us.

The two of us...

I looked up and into the mirror and saw reflections there within reflections. Saw what, even with my forewarning of the fact, I still could hardly believe existed, let alone was right there in front of me. The same shade and texture of dark hair, of skin. The same general build, though he looked slightly heavier around the shoulders and waist. He looked a few years older than me, too, and rather less tan, or maybe just more tired. 'Coulda used a shave a couple of days back, which added to the general impression of weariness.

Modern fluorescent lights aren't exactly kind under the best of conditions. And these weren't the best of conditions.

Still, the eyes were almost exactly the same. An electric and nearly depthless green. Dangerous and compelling at the same time, if I have to say so myself. I'd never seen that exact shade anywhere before, even counting my three hundred years, except in my own shaving mirror. Almost incandescent at this moment, they caught the harsh light like a couple of expensive cut emeralds, betraying the very emotions that his face worked so hard to deny.

I stared deeply into them and was held, as he seemed almost equally held. Felt something slow and warm start to uncurl itself inside me. Calmly, I shut off the water and scrubbed my own hands dry on the thighs of my pants. Not caring, in that instant, if it would leave water marks. I had worn a pair of stone-washed blue jeans tonight for comfort, tight as his black ones seemed to be, but still I suddenly found myself wishing I'd worn one of my even tighter black leather ones.

It seemed to be right up his alley, much more than the loose long-sleeved ivory silk shirt I'd also put on to go out. Despite the fact that I'd unbent enough by the heat to actually roll up the sleeves a little. Still, much as I actually had come to like and even appreciate jeans, I hated the bland and casual nature of t-shirts almost to distraction. Though, in this one case, the plain cotton one he was wearing was so threadbare in spots that I would have sworn I could see the tiny shadows of his nipples beneath. Could freely imagine how little effort it would take to tear the thin stuff away completely. To bare him for further comparison.

Part of me was pleased his eyes followed my every movement, followed me, as I pivoted back around to stare directly at him. Directly into those eyes so very like my own.

"Kinda takes your breath away, don't it?" I commented quietly. "And, to think, we come by it naturally."

His face didn't change, but something flashed in his eyes. So fast, I couldn't tell what it was before it was gone again.

"You wanta blow this popsickle joint?" I asked, even more quietly. "Go somewhere a little more private and talk. I'm game if you are. Unless you just wanta kill me right here, right now, that is. And never find out... the truth."

"Mulder's truth," he said, so softly I almost didn't hear him. Maybe, I hadn't been meant to.

"Is it?" I answered anyway. Brightly and innocently.

He caught on instantly and his eyes narrowed. "Yeah," he said, at last. "I guess we do need to talk..." He cocked his head at me slightly and I knew instantly what he was fishing for. Not that he would ever believe it was my real name, even if it had been.

"Cory," I replied. "Cory Raines. At your service."

He didn't rise to the occasion. I was going to have to work on that.

Still, he got us out of there with a minimum of fuss, on either the part of my dollbaby or his para-friends. Seems he had no qualms about leaving them in the lurch. About just walking us outa there without a word to either. Without us being seen either. I could imagine that might have proved awkward otherwise; it wasn't as if we were a pair you could exactly miss or easily explain.

He grabbed me by the arm once we hit the parking lot and swung me around, right into that gun again. At least, he'd left the ice pick in his pocket, this time, for which I was mutely grateful. I'd rather be shot than stabbed any day. For more reasons than I'm going to get into right this minute.

Though you probably could come up with a few. And some of them might even be right. Or I'd admit to them, anyway, just to keep things interesting.

"My car's over there." I said, nodding across the asphalt. "The burgundy-red Charger convertible. 1969. Mint. Four hundred plus horses, not that I've gotten the chance to try them all out yet. I'll even let you drive, if you want. If you ask me real nice."

He didn't answer, but his fingers tightened past the bruising point and he began hauling me in the indicated direction, so I figured that was answer enough.

That warm place inside me uncurled even more when we got into range of my newest acquisition where she was parked under the far streetlight. Not that I don't still love my Packard, and likely always will. It was a reminder of some of my best days. My best decade. Days of bathtub gin and bullets. Of fast money and faster fame and excitement and danger and, most of all, Amanda. Looking and acting like a young girl in her beaded dresses and bright feathers and brighter still lipstick, then taking me to places I'd never known before existed with all the expertise her nearly eight hundred years could give her.

Not that I haven't loved other years, other centuries, too. It's just that that all too brief time really shone. More than most. More than I can almost bear remembering, sometimes. And I shone with it. So much so, I'd seriously consider trading in a good hundred years of life just to get it back.

But you must know what that's like. You have to. Or you're not really an Immortal, are you? We all have our regrets. Our bittersweet secrets. Some more than most.

Mortals, too. As this guy so obviously demonstrated. He wasn't overly rough, but he searched me, taking both my wallet and keys, before pushing me into the driver's seat of my own car. He kept his weapon trained on me the whole time he walked around and got into the other side. As if expecting me to jump him at any moment, and I don't mean in a good way. As if treachery was as ingrained a habit as breathing. Both enacting some, himself, and expecting it from others.

I put my hands up on the steering wheel and relaxed back into the seat, enjoying the freshness of the night after the cramped heat of the bar. From out of the corner of my eye, I saw him going through my wallet. Wasn't much there. I tend to travel light. Just a Wisconsin driver's license--not the name I'd just given him, but I doubted he'd really care or expect otherwise--and a couple of credit cards in the same name and a few hundred dollars in assorted bills.

He took the driver's license out from behind the plastic and held it up, turned and compared it to me. I turned my head and smiled at his speculative look.

"If you want it, go ahead and keep it," I said. "I have more at home, and I never really liked that name much, anyway. No matter how useful it's been."

Expressionless now, he tucked it back away, then stuck the whole wallet in the pocket of his jacket. "No, thanks."

I went back to looking at the steering wheel. "So, where you wanta go? Your place or mine?"

"You got a place here?" he asked in lieu of an answer.

I shrugged. "Been staying at a friend's cabin back in the woods. Kinda quiet. If that's what you like. She's outa town right now. Could go there. It's about an hour's drive, though, so if yours is closer..."

He tossed the car keys at me abruptly and I caught them out of the air without even bothering to look. Wasn't sure if he was the type to be impressed by that, but I'd take what I could get. With this guy, it seemed that's what you'd have to do to get anywhere or anything. He wasn't exactly giving it away.

"Just drive," he said, settling back in his own seat. The gun now held crossways over his stomach, aimed directly at my side.

"Whatever you say," I replied and stuck the keys into the ignition. Started her up. He didn't react to the throaty roar that followed, or to the speed at which I pulled out of the parking lot and onto the main road. Just a quick sharp flicker of his eyes, when I raised my left arm up and nonchalantly let it come to rest on the top of the door.

We passed a pickup coming in the other direction--probably heading towards the bar we'd just left--and then a '78 or '79 ghost-white Trans Am. The guy driving it raised a hand in greeting and I raised mine back, getting another threatening glance from my passenger in response. Probably had seen me at the car show earlier. Or was just letting me know how much he admired my own wheels.

I turned left when we came to the center of the small town, barely stopping for the flashing red light hanging in the middle of the intersection, and then began picking up speed as the buildings thinned out. Darkness and trees closing in, livened up with only the occasional gravel side road or mailbox, a flash of a distant yard or house light. Didn't take much to be back out in the boonies around here. If you'd ever really left it to begin with.

The road dipped down and the trees grew thicker as we entered a hollow, the road winding gently alongside the darker line of a stream, and I let us drift upwards on the speedometer again. The rush of cooling air over my face and arm was soothing and sweet. The full moon glowing high in the sky making silver light glance off the polished chrome of the Charger. I wondered if he was enjoying any of it. If I dared to try a little innocuous conversation. Or if he would just hit me for it like FBI had, responding with an amazing amount of abuse for what little'd actually been said. As if what was writ between the lines was so much more important and damning.

"So," I finally said, deciding to take the risk, make the experiment. "Just what did you do to our mutual friend? That he hates you so much? Give away his favorite suit to Good Will or something?" Okay, I guess, that wasn't exactly innocuous, but it was more certain to get a reaction.

I shot him a glance, but his eyes were shuttered now, utterly expressionless. They looked darker, too, as if something had closed down in them. Locking out color and light. If I hadn't already known he was a killer, I would have known it then. And I should have been instantly and unforgivably afraid--for life and limb and continuing ease of comfort--but, somehow, I wasn't. Instead, I felt a heat rush up through me, only to sink back down again a couple of seconds later, consolidating and pooling in my lower stomach and groin.

Maybe, I was going to be happy not to have worn those leather pants, after all.

"What did he tell you?" the other man responded. Again, a question for a question. It was starting to get a bit annoying, not to mention discouraging.

"Oh, not much," I replied. Keeping my tone light. "Just that you killed his daddy. Spied on him. Made his life a sheer and living hell and so on. That's all." Mulder hadn't actually told me all that--hadn't had the time, let alone the inclination--but I could speculate. Read between the lines a little, myself.

His jaw tightened a notch, but that was the only reaction. Outwardly, anyway. "Anything else?"

I shrugged slightly. "The rest of the evening was kinda taken up with other things. If you know what I mean."

Definitely a tightening. A forced casualness. "No. Why don't you tell me."

I glanced at him. At the gun still focused on my side. If I was lucky it would shatter a rib in passing and be deflected a little; gut wounds were so damn painful. Quite often took a long time for you to die, too. Not my favorite place to get shot, but beggars can't be choosers.

Not even these days.

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. "Alex," I said. There was a small narrowing of eyes at the use of his name, but that was to be expected. Anticipated. "Why don't you let me clarify a few things for you. One--I'm no threat to you. In any fashion. Two--whatever your Agent Mulder did to me, he did under the assumption that I was you. With whatever that connotates. Three--if you pull that trigger right now, well, let's just say I've taken a car like this for a roll before at this speed and it's not a pretty sight. If there's anyone left to see it..." I took in a soft breath, then let it out again, hesitating.

He caught the movement, as he'd been meant to. "And four?" he asked. His voice was husky, cutting under the sound of the wind and engine despite its quiet tone.

I eased off on the gas a fraction as we approached a sharp turn. Taking it half on the other side of the road so as to not have to slow down any more than was absolutely necessary. A fresh stretch of road opened up before us, the light of the moon making it look almost like a strip of water. With not even a mailbox, let alone another car in sight to mar the perfection of it. As if we were the last two people left alive on the earth.

"Four," I said, then smiled a little. It was a private smile, but I wanted him to see it anyway. To wonder. "I've actually been wanting to meet you, strange as that may sound. Which is the reason why I followed you into that bathroom in the first place. And why I'm letting you get away with kidnapping me now."

A slight line appeared between his eyes. "You wanted to meet me? You mean you tracked me down? You knew I was going to be there?"

Jesus, the man was almost as paranoid as a certain perverse and rather petulant FBI agent. "No," I replied. "That was just pleasant happenstance. The universe cutting me a deal. It's part of my standard contract, you see, with Lady Luck. Right up there with never getting a parking ticket and always getting my share of sugar. You oughta look into a little arrangement, yourself. Seems to me you could use some serendipity."

"I don't believe in luck," he replied. But the line had eased a little.

I laughed, gave him a quick glance. Just a partial dose of my best smile. "Now, there's your problem. If you don't believe in Lady Luck, then how can she believe in you? No wonder your life's so damn fucked up."

He was trying to keep his face blank, but his eyes gave away his confusion. No matter that the gun never wavered. Never even twitched. I wasn't acting like a man should act in my situation and it was obviously bothering him. Bothering him more and more, probably right up to the point of wanting to just go ahead and blow me away just in case. Just to make sure.

I was right; the man had a limited appreciation for curiosity. At least, when it impacted on his continued well-being, the safety of his small and probably quite bleak world. When it didn't involve a certain Fox William Mulder.

"Pull over," was all he said, though. It was more than enough.

There was a small rundown dirt road a little ways ahead and I slowed down and turned off into it. Pulled us in under the tattered overhang of the trees, their leaves blocking out all but the tiniest flecks of moonlight, and carefully brought the car to rest amongst tall grass and even taller bushes, hoping the closest ones wouldn't scratch the paintjob too much. It was much darker here and the light from the dashboard glowed on his face, on the hard edge of his knuckles as he reached out and pressed the barrel of that gun into me. Right on that rib that I'd already decided was going to perform a heroic sacrifice if need be.

And it looked more and more like need may be.

A damn shame and not entirely my own fault and blood was such a bitch to get out of upholstery.

"Now," he said. Breathed, more like. "You're gonna give me some answers. And if they're good enough, I just may let you walk away from here. And if they're not, if I'm not entirely satisfied, then I'm gonna kill you. Who or whatever you are."

I looked back into eyes so like and unlike my own. And that heat returned, stronger and more liquid than before, running through my veins like moonlight over water. Explosive and potent as a jar full of shine. As under-the-counter, too. At least, for as long as my jeans and the shadows could hide the evidence.

"Okay," I replied, almost as quietly. My voice didn't quite have that precise and smoky edge that his did, but I figured it was husky enough in that moment. That he would be able to hear what I was feeling, even if my actual words didn't give away the game. "I wouldn't want you to be... unsatisfied. Alex."

The gun pressed in a shade harder. "Don't call me that," he said, his voice flattening out. Growing, if possible, even softer.

"And why shouldn't I?" I asked, reasonably enough. "He did."

That shook him, shattered his composure, even if he somehow managed to recapture it a scant second later. It immediately sent my thoughts spiraling into other pleasantries; control like that could be a blessing in disguise. As could convincing him to lose it, if it was done in just the right fashion.

Maybe, he couldn't see it yet, but I could--a moonlit night, the top down on the convertible, just the two of us parked all alone on some secluded side road with only the sound of the crickets in the grass and our whispered encouragements for company. All it would take was an old song playing softly on the radio to bring the moment to seductive completion. I guess I really am rather a romantic at heart. And an optimist, considering the gun still pressing hard into my side and the way he was looking at me. As if he couldn't decide whether it would be better to shoot me right here and dump the body out in the woods, or cram it into the trunk for a quick trip to the nearest landfill. Or river. Or... well, you get the picture.

I'm sure you've had similar situations spelled out for you often enough.

"Who are you?" he asked again. "Really?"

I turned off the engine--even the faint light from the dashboard fading away--and turned to meet his eyes calmly. Tried to find within myself a hint of the seriousness that he was demanding. "I already told you. My name is Cory Raines, despite what it said on my license, and I first found out about you and our... extreme resemblance... about three or four months ago." Actually, I knew the exact date, but I wasn't letting on to that. Somehow, I got the feeling that my lookalike would be royally pissed if he knew how much I'd thought about that night. About what I and FBI had gotten up to that night. About how much I'd like to do it again.

"And...?" He didn't let up, not on the gun or his gaze.

I let my own gaze slide off into the middle distance. At the tiny shards of wayward moonlight that made it through the trees and down to where we were sitting. "Not much to say. Your friend with the smokes had me picked up off the streets and tried to... convince me, shall we say, to give him some kinda tape or something he was in bad need of. When I kept telling him that I had no clue about what he was talking about, he got fed up with me eventually and had me removed. They were trying for permanently, but I'm harder to kill than some might imagine."

I half-way expected some response to that, but the other man said nothing. Just waited, so quietly and so very contained that, if I didn't have the gun as a reminder, I almost would have thought he wasn't there at all. Like an absence. Less, even, than a shadow. A shadow is always cast from something. From some light, no matter how distant.

"So," I went on, my words falling into that void, that silence, like stones into a deep still pond. Making me wonder if they would ever hit bottom. "That's when your FBI man entered the picture."

"He's not mine," a rough voice commented. A ripple. An indication that that pond wasn't quite as still as I'd imagined.

I looked back over at him, but he was just a dark shape within greater darkness. Only form, no definition. "He thought I was you, as well," I said, softening my tone a touch. "And he wanted the same thing from me--the tape. And, unlike the other, he wasn't taking no or I don't know as an answer." The corner of my mouth twitched up before I could stop it. "Persistent little bugger. Smart, too. He figured out eventually that I wasn't who he thought I was, no matter that I'd been telling him that all along, and that I couldn't help him."

"So he just let you go?" Utter disbelief.

I shook my head. "No, he didn't just let me go. The so-called resolution of my 'identity crisis' only seemed to open up a new ball of wax." I let out a sharp little breath, suddenly perturbed, but not really sure why. "Shit, why can't some things just be simple, obvious, easy on the eye. No matter how unlikely they may seem. That's how I see things, anyway. But him? Shapeshifters and clones and aliens and conspiracy up the wazoo... doesn't the man ever take anything at face value? Can't he ever just let it go? Take it for what it is?"

Rhetorical questions, but they were answered anyway. A crack in the dark armor of the man sitting next to me. A glimpse of the depths it protected.

"No," Alex Krycek replied. "He can't. Or he won't."

There was a slight bitterness there, but I knew it would be chancing a bullet to pursue it. And my rib was already pleading for a reprieve.

"Well," I commented. "Maybe, it's a good thing, then, that I didn't hang around too long. Likely he would have wanted to dissect me. And been damn disappointed when I bled red and said 'ouch' just like everyone else around these parts."

It was a rather neat sidestep of the truth, but this guy didn't need to know that. That if FBI had actually worked hard enough to convince himself to believe in my little story, then he might have actually tried just that. Taken me in for a slightly different kind of examination than he'd already given me. But he hadn't--and I hadn't obliged him with a quick and dramatically clarifying death scene--so there it was. Not that we hadn't been busy for part of our time together with other things. Things far more personally distracting than the possibility of immortality. More immediately pleasurable, as well.

"Will you?" he asked.

I caught myself back, a reluctant maneuver. "What?"

"Bleed red."

Despite the gun, I slid down slightly in my seat. Let my legs sprawl out in front of me. "Fuck, yeah. What do you think?"

"I think..." he said thoughtfully, suddenly moving that gun up along my side, up until it had reached the juncture of shoulder and neck. Was grinding into an entirely different length of bone. "I think you're a liar. Cory. And a danger. And that I should just kill you."

I raised my head slightly and licked my lips. Let my eyes slide half-shut. "Go on," I said and, in this precise moment, my voice was as husky as his. "Do it, then." The words, the plea, seemed to come up out of some deep place inside me, one that wanted him so bad to pull that trigger, to spill my blood all over my new baby car and all over him. Most of all, all over him. A slick tide on his skin, soaking in under short-clipped nails and through the worn fabric of his t-shirt, blackening already black jeans.

Usually it's waking up from death that tends to turn me on--and that's a big time, boyo, foot loose and fancy free and ready to pound a nail with the damn thing if I can't get nothin' else kinda turn-on--but this time, this one evening and with this one man, I was finding that the thought of the actual dying was having much the same effect. At least, my cock was certainly digging it. Sitting up and taking notice. Shit, if it got much harder there was no way he wouldn't be noticing it himself, despite the lack of ambient light.

The gun shifted again, the tip of the barrel following the line of my throat, tipping my head further to one side. As if he was studying my face by a slender patch of moonlight. I wondered if the expression on my face made us look more alike or more fundamentally different. If he really wanted to kill me as much as I wanted him to.

As much as I wanted him.

Without warning, he gave a dry and almost painful sounding chuckle. Then the weapon was falling away and he was falling as well, sliding back and down in his own seat until he was as slumped and boneless as I was. Just from knowing him this short length of time, though, it was probably only appearance. Still, the gun had come to rest in his lap, pointing at nothing and nowhere in particular. At least, for the time being.

I sucked in a deep breath, tried to ease myself around the tightness of my jeans a little. As circumspectly as possible. I should have known better then to try and put one over on him. Shadowed eyes did a strip search on me and I stopped and raised an eyebrow at him. He just shook his head, hardly a gesture at all, then looked away again. Still, I never did know when to let well enough alone.

"What?"

He just shook his head again, a little harder this time. Then something seemed to give in him, a tiny trickle of real emotion escaping through the crack in his composure. A sadness born half of resignation and half of muted anger.

"He fucked you, didn't he?"

My stomach turned over and I almost snapped back an instant and unequivocal baby-am-I-lying-through-my-teeth "no." Instinctive denial is a fine impulse as far as that goes, and it has gotten me out of a lot of scrapes and into some as well, but still I had the oddest feeling that it wasn't called for here, that it wouldn't be a good idea. Despite how prudent it seemed to be considering who was holding the gun around here.

"It wasn't entirely his own idea," I said at last.

He closed his eyes and his jaw tightened, then loosened again.

"Besides," I forged on, not sure if that was an encouraging or discouraging reaction. "He didn't know me from Adam. It was you he thought he was fucking. Like he'd wanted you for a long time."

Another jump of the jaw. "Thanks. I really needed to hear that." Deathly dry.

I shrugged, even though he couldn't see it. It hadn't been kind, but it was true. And the truth was rarely kind, no matter how much FBI went about drooling after it. Desperately wanting to find it waiting for him gift-wrapped and glittering under his Christmas tree. "No problem. Question is--you gonna kill me for it? Or just make me pay... in kind, if you will?"

His eyes snapped back open at that, though no other expression, surprise or otherwise, made it to his face. "Sure of yourself, aren't you?" he asked, a dark sarcasm mixing with the dryness.

I could have told him three hundred years could do that for you, but let it ride.

"Yep," I replied instead. "Beats staying home on a Saturday night, don't ya think?"

"It's Friday," he commented, almost totally desert now. Sun-baked and gritty and prickly with cactus and thirsty cowboys, one step away from eating their own boots.

"All the better. We can have all weekend then if you like. A couple of days for you to make me make it up to you. If that's what you want. If that's what you'd like. Alex."

This time, he didn't correct me. "Why?" he asked instead, an equally frustrating question. Always has been.

"Why not?" I responded, unable to head off the quip this time. I relented a moment later, however, answered in a far softer tone. "Why? 'Cause I want you. That's all. That's why. It's one of those simple, obvious, easy on the eye things I was talking about. The kind that FBI don't believe in. Can't deal with. But I do. I live there. You wanta know why, babydoll... well, I just want you, and have ever since a kinda confused FBI man took both a pounding and a liking to my face. Ever since he fucked me blind because of it. Because of you."

He straightened back up a little in his seat. "You're fucking nuts, you know that?"

I stood no chance against the next quip. Just had to let it go. "As long as I'm fucking something..."

He shook his head again. "Shit." The sudden drop, the deep huskiness of his voice made the swear word almost beautiful. About as beautiful as his face as he leaned towards me again, hard eyes scanning my face. His face. The face that had gotten me what he'd likely always wanted. "I can't fucking believe this."

I gave him a commiseratingly sad little smile. "Didn't mean to freak you out. I just sometimes get carried away, that's all. By the moment. Can't pass things up. Even the ones I really should."

So that was an understatement, but what can you do? It's hard to change the habits of a single lifetime, let alone a whole horde of em.

"You really expect me to..." He trailed off, as if darkness and dust had finally swallowed the last of his voice. Eaten it up entirely.

"I don't expect anything," I replied. "I just hope."

And maybe that had been a swear word to him, a curse, a threat, because he flinched a little, almost as if I'd struck him. He restrained himself, though--that control coming in handy again--and, instead, leaned a shade closer to me. A tiny patch of moonlight shifted and caught at his eyes, was caught in them, and they were black and green and impossible and deadly all at once. I stared back into them, not letting go of them either, even as I sensed the gun coming back up between us again. Felt it brush briefly across the ivory silk of my shirt, light as air, soft as a stolen breath.

"I don't," he said, a brutal and heartwrenching confession. One that his eyes matched. Surrendered to. Was abruptly sundered by.

So he killed me.

What did ya expect he would do? Kiss me? No matter how irresistible I am--or even think I am--that just wasn't in the cards. Not after what I'd just admitted to. What I'd stolen from him. No matter that he'd never bothered to try and take it himself. But, then, logic doesn't usually figure in very well in affairs of the heart. You know that.

And it's not like that's not your first impulse, too, dang near every time you run into me. To kill me, I mean. Oh, not in that I challenge you and I'm gonna take your fucking head now kinda way, but just... to kill me. 'Cause I annoy you, I guess. Or my life style does. Or some such thing. Don't bother to try and lie to me about it; I'm better at it, anyway, and I can still spot a bogus deal a half mile away.

More champagne...? Thanks. I have another bottle if we run through this one. Actually, more than one. Never leave home without it.

Anyway, I came to an unknown length of time later, stuffed in the trunk of my new burgundy-red Charger. The roar of the engine rampaging through my head like it was trying to jumpstart each neuron all by its lonesome, and the rough road we were on shimmying and shaking me between spare tire and the case of champagne I'd picked up to bring back to the cabin for Monday's sweet and tear-stained reunion with my latest girldoll. She'd cried when she'd had leave me to go away for the weekend and she was sure to cry when she came back. A sensitive thing, younger even than her years would give her. But oh so uninhibited in the nicest of ways, at the same time. Having hippies rather than Puritans for parents has its advantages, I must say.

It's disillusionments, too. Rather more sad to say.

At least her parents had left her with more than just a hankering for a nonconformist lifestyle. It's so much better to suffer for your art when you're rich. Especially if ya gotta eat. And take care of new boyfriends with certain old and rather expensive tastes.

I wasn't pissed off, mind you. Far from it. At being killed, I mean. Though I was about ready to strangle my own damn jeans about this time. Or be strangled by them. And I'd thought I'd been hard before. But this was real agony, one that I simply adored and that my "murderer" most definitely was going to have to do something about. If I had any say in the matter.

Carefully, I unwound myself and reached up to touch the side of my head. There was dried blood there, matted into the hair. That much of it I remembered. How fast he'd moved and how hard he'd hit me with that gun. The familiar crunch of metal and bone meeting and bone losing out, as it tended to do. The rest of it was less clear, but had been even quicker--how he'd reached out a bare half-second later and hit me just below my right ear, one sharp and brutal thrust of his fingers. Giving me over to blackness, sudden and overwhelming and edged with a green and need and hurt as hard and jagged as his eyes had been in that last moment.

The eyes of a stranger and of a friend. Not that he knew that yet. Or would have admitted to it.

To how the needs of another had bound us together.

The car bumped through a deeper pothole or rut in the road and I cursed silently and fluently; if he wrecked it, even put one damn fool scratch in it, then he was going to have to pay. In more ways than one.

In all the ways I could think of to enjoy.

I don't know how long it was before the car skewed abruptly to the right and came to a halt. He let the engine run for a few moments, then shut it off. In the sudden silence I could hear the sound of water. Close by. So, it was the river then. Washing away all sin and inconvenient evidence. Like freshly killed bodies. Not that this freshly killed body didn't have a little surprise in mind for its killer. A little surprise and then a much bigger surprise, one that was already throbbing slightly with each beat of my heart.

I heard the car door open and closed my eyes, readying myself. Making myself go as limp as possible, hard-on not withstanding. I figured I'd let him go through the trouble and effort of wrestling my corpse out of the trunk and then I'd take control of the situation.

The key slid in the lock and then air came rushing in and the sound of water grew even louder. We must have been parked right up near the bank. Smart of the boy. The better not to have to drag my sorry carcass too far; folks seemed to grow heavier once they were dead and I'd lugged enough of them to know. Had myself lugged, too.

Not by you, of course. But then I'd expect you to leave me face down in the dirt given half a chance these days. And no hard feelings about it, so don't go getting all guilt-stricken and redemptive about it. Everybody's got their cross to bear. Their crimes to consider in the long hours before morning, when you can't sleep and all those damn ghosts come out to play, rattling their chains and trying like hell to scare you straight. Like you were ever more than a crooked fence post to begin with. And don't go thinking of that as any kind of confession or regret on my part. I have none. No guilt and no shame.

And neither, it seemed, did he, my humorless twin. He handled me as matter-of-factly and impersonally as a sack of rotten grain, shifting me over to get the best grip on my lax form. He was strong, too; just a slight exhalation of breath, of effort, as he lifted me and swung me out. As he shifted his grip and started to put me up and over his shoulder in a fireman's carry.

That's when I--matter-of-factly, but far less impersonally--slugged him in the stomach. It wasn't a particularly powerful blow, lacking a bit in leverage, but it caught him unawares and made him buckle. I immediately twisted in his grip and threw him the rest of the way off balance and hit him again, clipping him high on the cheekbone as we both went down. We landed nearly at the same time on the rough grass and dirt. Or, rather, he landed on the ground and I landed half on top of him, knocking what was left of his breath clean out of him.

Gotta give it to em, though. He recovered fast. And he was fast. Fast and ruthless and well-trained.

Which isn't to say that I can't be fast, ruthless when need be, and haven't had training of my own. Just a couple of hundred years off and on. Actually, I've always preferred hand-to-hand when you come right down to it, rather than involving all those big nasty swords. Guy could get killed that way.

Guy could get killed trying to subdue the slippery devil I was rolling around with, too. I blocked several punches, one of which skated just past my right eye and might have blinded me if it had hit me straight on. Plus acouple of even more blatant attempts to slam my nasal cavity up into my brain and one particularly vicious blow to that same vulnerable point just below my ear that had knocked me for a loop before. At the last, when he realized that he was losing despite all his efforts, he even aimed a knee to the groin that would have really hurt if it had connected. Especially at the moment.

Through it all, I didn't hit back, though it would have made the fight less lengthy and more comfortable. For me, at least. It was a bitch, but I finally ended up just where I wanted to be--right on top of him, with his own gun in my hand, the barrel pressed in-between us like a curious doubling effect of my own erection, and my finger hard on the trigger. He'd tried to break my wrist when I'd first gotten a hold the weapon in its holster, but I hadn't been having any of it. Not twice in one night. Getting murdered, I mean. Everything else was fair game.

So I'd just taken it from him with a move I'd learned sometime about the mid-19th century from a mercenary in a Viennese tavern and slammed him back into the dirt and held him there with my legs, my left arm across his shoulder. My right jamming the gun down between a pair of ribs as if I would try and pry the two apart slowly if he didn't desist.

He did. Again, a smart lad. He was breathing hard by this time, much harder than me, and his eyes were almost a weapon onto themselves, glaring up at me with all the finesse of a wrecking ball. Obviously, he hated losing almost more than he hated living through it. And he hated himself most of all for having to make that decision, as if he'd only been battling with himself in the end. Which, maybe, in a way, he had.

I looked down into those eyes and fought off a smile that I knew would only infuriate him further. The fingers of his right hand were still digging down into my arm, twisting at my skin through the silky slick material as it he could pull it clean off the bone. Pushing upwards on it as if he thought he could actually force the gun away from his chest. Force it back on me. I resisted the pull and just pressed the barrel in harder, grinding deeper between his ribs, and shook my head. Pressed my erection down into one tense thigh nearly as forcefully. He blinked up at me and for a second, those fingers tightened down even more desperately, then abruptly relaxed their grip. Not releasing me, but no longer fighting. Choosing instead to bide their time.

"Now," I said. The soft intimate-seeming purr of my voice made his eyes narrow a touch, but their intensity never let up. Neither did the tension in his body. It felt like I was holding down a tightly-wound spring. "I suggest we have another little talk. Or something, anyway. What do you say?"

"I have a choice?" he asked. His voice was equally soft, but it was a false sweetness. Like a candy-coating over some bitter pill. The taste of almonds in your espresso that turned out to be cyanide, after all.

"Of course," I replied. Leaning down a little closer. The full moon was just sliding into the right corner of his eyes, reflecting back brilliant little shards of light. Masking as much as they illuminated. God, I wanted to kiss the bastard. But he'd only bite me if I tried, and not in a nice way. "There's always a choice."

"Is there?" A skeptical sound more than a question. "You have the gun."

"So did he," I replied.

He swallowed and I felt the movement shiver all through him. As if he'd been the one to be ditched in that river, no doubt spring-fed and cold as all get out despite the warmth of the last couple of days. I seemed to be running more than a bit hot, myself. Though the current weather had little to nothing to do with it. The fabric of my shirt felt plastered to my back. No doubt, it was grimy as well and ruined and I knew who was going to have to pay for that.

He gave no warning--not in his eyes or in his body--but I knew he was going to try anyway, then. Despite what it would cost him. I forced my own face to a stillness that felt almost alien to me, but was no doubt familiar as all hell to him, and slid the gun along the edge of one of those ribs. Scraping along the bone. Knowing it had to hurt.

"Don't," I said.

He got the point. Didn't even bother to argue. A few others in the past haven't proved nearly as perceptive, or maybe they just couldn't bring themselves to believe that I was capable of serving any serious harm on their earthly forms. What? Did you think I'd never killed? Just 'cause I don't get off on it or go around looking for it doesn't mean that I'm some kind of wimp. I do what I have to do, just like most folks... just with a bit more innate flare, I suspect.

I let out a quiet breath and showed him the bare edge of my teeth. Not a smile, but something near enough. "Good boy. Now, I'm gonna get up and you're gonna behave yourself. Unless you really wanta find out how well you can swim with a couple of rounds in you?"

"Not particularly, no, " he replied.

"Your choice," I answered. More softly, but I knew he'd hear it. Hate it. Resent me for it.

I watched him carefully as I prized myself up and off of him. Knelt back in my own pocket of dust and held the gun pointed directly and firmly at his midsection. His eyes fell momentarily to my crotch, as if he couldn't quite help himself, but returned almost immediately back to my face.

"Your turn," I said. "Get up. On your knees. Hands well away from your body."

He did as I asked, moving as slowly and cautiously as I had. Keeping his arms out from his sides, his hands open and loose. His eyes, if anything, were turning even colder. They were watchful and self-possessed and wickedly sharp. Keen as the sound of a blade slicing full tilt towards the back of your neck. You know the feeling. Terrifying and exhilarating all at once. The last thing you'd ever know.

"It was red," he said in a hint of the same soft and sibilant voice. A non-sequitor normally, but I understood what he meant.

"Last time I checked, yeah," I replied. "But I didn't have time to say 'ouch.' For which, I have you to thank."

"Sorry."

"Sure, you are," I said, my tone full of the same false sorrow. "Sorry you didn't get away with it."

His eyes flickered over me once again and maybe I imagined that they rested a shade longer on what the tight lines of my jeans could barely bother to hide anymore. "Looking pretty good for a dead man," he commented.

I allowed myself more of a smile, this time. "Thanks. I've put in a rather lot of practice, you might say. Speaking of which, that was a nice neat trick of yours. Very effective."

"One would think," he replied, not quite the Sahara this time, but close.

I tilted my head slightly. "I could give you the gun back, of course, and let you have another go at it. But I'm not feeling overly kind this evening, so let's just say that the first one was free. The rest you'll have to earn. And I'm not a cheap date. Easy, maybe, but never cheap."

He let out a little sound that could hardly be mistaken for a laugh. "What do you want from me?" he asked. "Really?"

I shrugged. A tiny shrug, just enough for him to get the picture. "Not much. And everything." I raised the gun minutely. "For you to get on your face, Alex. Right now. And put your hands behind your back. You probably know the drill, being in the FBI once. If you haven't forgotten. And then... well, you can probably imagine as well as I can. Maybe even better, but we'll see. I've got a few years on you, after all."

His eyes flashed and it wasn't the moonlight this time. "If you're going to kill me," he hissed. "Then just fucking kill me, okay?"

"I'll see if I can work it in," I replied, then gestured with the gun again. "Now."

He hesitated one long moment, then did as I told him. Lowering himself to the ground and then sliding his arms back, his face turned to one side as far as it could go as he continued to watch me. Only the quick rise and fall of his back betraying how much he resented being made helpless like this. How much he was hoping I would slip up.

I got to my own feet without ever taking my eyes off him and then backed up until I ran into the bumper of the Charger. I reached back with my free hand into the left side of the trunk and fished around until I found the handle of my roadside emergency kit. I may not have a handy dandy set of those metal bracelets his ex-partner had--at least, not on me--but I did have the next best thing. A nearly-full roll of duct tape. The sticky and silver magic of the 20th century with a thousand and one uses, some of which they actually feel free to advertise. This wasn't going to be one of them.

I almost expected him to try something again when I approached him and knelt down to one side. His eyes just tracked me, though. Tracked the gun in my other hand.

"Put your wrists together," I said. "Tight, if you please."

He didn't move. Not even his eyes changed.

I lowered my voice. "Or, if you don't please, I could always shoot some non-essential part of you beforehand. I may even let you pick. How's that for being a nice guy?"

Still, he didn't react. Not until I slipped that gun in under his jaw and used it to tilt his head further back. Making his neck strain. His lips were pressed tightly together--an indignant line of mute refusal--and I wanted suddenly to lick them, to nudge them apart with my own tongue and taste that resentment and dust-dry anger. At this angle, his eyes looked more black than green again, but, despite the current situation, they were not the same killer's eyes of before. They were suddenly full of deeper shadows than that.

I had the strange suspicion I knew what one of those shadows was named.

I moved the gun again, sliding it closer to his chin, to that compressed and silent mouth. Wondered if I could get him to open up for it. If he would like it as much as I did. If we had that, too, in common.

"I sucked his gun, you know," I abruptly admitted, before I really knew I was going to. An almost involuntary confession. "He seemed to get off on it as much as I did. Go figure."

He didn't much like what I'd just said--not that he'd given himself away, not by a single flick of an eyelash or a bare pause of breath--but that knowledge was like an instinctive thing to me all the same. A little creature burrowing away deep in my guts, butting its blunt head towards more sensitive areas. It made me want to go on, to tell him in grand and glorious detail what FBI had sucked on for my behalf, what confessions he had wrung out of me. But it wasn't likely to win me any cooperation at the moment. There was a time and place for everything, isn't that how the quote goes? A season for seduction and a season for... more seduction?

Still, when he closed his eyes at the last and pressed his wrists together as I'd asked, I knew that I'd won this battle, if not the war. Quickly, I straddled him and put one knee hard to the middle of his back, before daring to give the gun a temporary home in the tight waistband of my jeans. Before beginning to tape those proffered wrists together.

He didn't fight at all, but those hands were clenched almost too tightly for blood and the steady clarity of his breathing told me how very much he hated this and me for doing it to him. For making him vulnerable to the images I'd called up in his mind, if not the weapon I'd been holding on him. The tape I was wrapping him up with. He was a prisoner to it all. A prisoner of a man with the more than apropos name of Fox Mulder. And of his own trap of memory, of need and want and desire. One he likely hadn't even seen until it was too late or couldn't have avoided even if he had seen it in time. As if the bait had been just too damn tempting.

I could believe that. I'd seen it. Touched it. Tasted it. Felt it come hard into my ass as if to turn me inside out with the sheer force of his emissions.

Oh, sorry. Got a little carried away there. Fill up my glass again, would you, and please ignore my more over enthusiastic color commentary. Which were a strange kind of silvery grey, by the way, when they weren't being brown or blue or green. Oh, yeah, didn't I tell you FBI had eyes kinda like those mood rings popular a few years back, displaying every change, every emotion. Every desire, wanted or unwanted. As if they were mutable and constant at the same time, all the tides of the ocean.

A guy could become addicted to eyes like that. To what they held and what they denied, which were sometimes one and the same thing.

I suspected more than one had.

When I finally had the duct tape layered and knotted up around his wrists as tightly as I dared make it, I pulled the gun out again and held it loosely in my hand. Glancing back and forth between the weapon and the man on the ground beneath me. It was a .38, compact enough to make it easy to carry and big enough to have some stopping power. Much like the man who wore it, I imagined.

In a way, I've become an connoisseur of guns and bullets, having dodged and been taken down by them often enough since they've come into vogue. Sometimes, I swear I can tell the exact caliber of the bullet from the way it hit me, from the flying sting of a .22 all the way up to the shattering impact of a .357. Shotguns were the worst--or the best, as the case may be--sending you into a curious state of shock where everything becomes both crystal-clear and fuzzy at the same time. Where you can hear every separate and distinct beat of your heart as it pumps your blood clear of your body, like the slow tick of a cooling car engine.

I wondered if my dark twin had ever been shot. Likely, he had. Though not by a .357 or a shotgun or he wouldn't have been around for me to spot him in the back of some seedy bar. Unless, he was very very lucky, and I already knew his opinion on that score.

I pressed down briefly with my knee, grinding his ribcage firmly into the dirt, then let up. I took a stronger grip of the gun and rose back to my feet. Backed slowly away from him.

"Get up," I said when I saw his eyes come to rest on me once more.

This time, he didn't hesitate, didn't resist. He instantly rolled to his side and got his feet back under him. Continued the motion and rose almost as gracefully as I had, even more so considering that his hands were bound behind his back. I hadn't noticed until now, but he did seem to be slightly taller than me. Of course, the longer I lived the more this was true, and I'd been considered a rather tall man once, myself. Though there were decided benefits to having women of the same height now, though most of them were much too thin for my tastes. Even Amanda had been more than a bit on the skinny side, but she'd just been so much fun I hadn't minded at all.

I guess, in some ways, we're all products--or victims--of our times. No matter how long we live or how far we come from them. From the mortals who raised us.

But this one. He was no skirt to be wooed and won and easily abandoned. He was a dangerous man, mortal or not. And danger always required a special touch, careful handling. Sometimes even a sacrifice or two. Certainly, far more than a single silk shirt, no matter how expensive it had been.

The moonlight suited him as the florescent lights hadn't. It made his shirt nearly glow, traced well-worn and slender ridges along the black leather of his jacket. His dark hair emphasizing how very pale his skin was. All the lines smoothed over to a firm and marble clarity, making him look years younger. Young as he probably was. His calm gaze just lended to the effect, made it seem as if he could just stand there all night. Waiting for me to make up my mind about what to do with him.

What a fine liar he was turning out to be; I could see what FBI saw in him, though the qualities that I knew to appreciate were most probably the very ones he despaired of. The ones that drove him to such extremes of anger and of passion.

No doubt, he wouldn't have been able to stand the so serene green eyes I was facing right now. Not and try to break them. I thought it rather a shame, myself, but I was going to have to do the same. I was going to have to shatter that composure, sully that perfect and distant shade. I wouldn't be able to trust him, otherwise.

So I met his eyes with a placid gaze of my own. "Go on and ask me," I said. "I know you're just dying to know. To hear all the... exquisite details."

For a second or two, I thought he wasn't going to respond, that he'd already gone too far away inside himself, but then he lifted his head slightly. "Why would you think that?" As serene and dispassionate as his eyes. Two lies in one. Precisely matched. "Just because Mulder's got a couple of screws loose, you think I don't up from down? That I really care what he gets up to in his free time, let alone who he... fucks."

That last word came out rather more dark, but it still didn't touch him.

"Yes," I said simply. "Yes, I think you do." I took a small step forward--the better to watch his eyes I told myself, but then I was a grand little liar as well. "I think that's why you killed me. Or part of why, anyway. You just couldn't stand it. That I'd had what you hadn't, what you couldn't. Or what you told yourself that you couldn't. Such a shame, since it turns out that you could. That the only thing stopping you was... you. Not him. Not at all."

"Fuck you," he said softly, a shadow given voice.

"Like he fucks you night after night?" I asked nearly as softly. "Makes you wake up from your dreams with all the frustration and embarrassment of a pimple-faced adolescent boy. Why did you betray him?"

My sudden switch caught him momentarily flat-footed, but he reclaimed himself quickly. "I had no choice."

I shook my head slightly. "So you keep saying. But that's just your excuse, isn't it? I think the real reason was that you were afraid, Alex. Afraid of him and of yourself. Of an uncertain future. Or of giving up too much. Giving yourself away. And so you risked nothing and won nothing. Surprise. Surprise. What kinda fucking life is that?"

"You don't know anything about it or me," he protested, but those green eyes so like my own were no longer quite as detached.

"I beg to differ. In fact, I believe I begged for more than that by the time he was done with me."

If he could have murdered me with his eyes right then he would have cheerfully done so. So much for that illusion he had been subsisting on. Hoping that it would save him. I gave him a small smile and an "A" for effort, but didn't relent.

"You don't get it, do you?" I went on. "But then why should I expect you to. You all think time is so very precious when time is nothing. A snap of the fingers, a pull of a trigger. One wrong turn. One blown tire. And it's gone, just like that." I gestured with the gun, but he didn't react. Didn't even flinch. "But what does it matter, I ask you... mister Alex Krycek. If you weren't doing anything with it to begin with? If you weren't making the most of it, taking what you can take and savoring the best. Choosing to take that gamble, because the only way you can lose--really lose--is if you hadn't the guts to take it at all."

I stopped, because his eyes had gone an even more dangerous color. He was angry. Angry and controlling it, holding it inside as tightly as he could.

"Nice speech," was all he said, though. "Got any other advice or has my quarter run out?"

"No," I said quietly. "But I think maybe your options are. It doesn't seem to me that things have been going exactly swimmingly lately, have they? Not from the current state of your clothes or from the company you were keeping."

"I get by." Antarctica now, instead of the Sahara. Just another desert, though.

"Ah," I said, pushing some more, unable to stop myself. "A glowing recommendation. How far the mighty can fall when they put their minds to it."

He shifted on his feet, straightening slightly, and I raised the gun a hair. Warning him back to stillness. His voice dropped another few degrees as a result, a jagged whisper of ice. "I'm so glad you find my life amusing. Is that why you really wanted to see me--to tell me what a fuck-up I am?"

"I already gave you the answer to that," I replied, not cold, but just as softly. "He's the one who told me you were a 'fuck-up,' as you put it. Or, at least, how bad you fucked him up. Did you have something against him personally, or was it just a job, after all? He sure seems to have taken it personally."

He stared back at me a long hard moment, then something seemed to break in him again--just a slender crack, but it was enough--and he looked away. It wasn't an admission of guilt, but it was an admission of something. I got that melting sensation again. So hard and yet so forlorn at the same time; I could see where FBI couldn't make up his mind over whether to shoot him or screw him.

"Get in the car," I said then. "We're gonna go for a little ride. And, this time, it's my quarter."

He shot me a look even I couldn't read, but began to move around to the passenger side of the Charger. I watched him until he was standing right next to the door, then slammed the trunk shut and reclaimed my keys. I tossed the roll of duct tape into the back seat--never know when it might come in handy--and slid back into my baby, before popping the other door open for him. He settled in as best he could and I pressed the gun lightly into his side as I leaned over him to close the door behind him. It only took a few seconds, but I was entirely too aware of what a risk I was taking. Much as I was aware of his breathing, just a bit on the quick side, and of his heat and a strange subtle prickling sensation from where our bodies met. Like an electrical spark jumping home.

I leaned back and looked at him, but he was pointedly not looking at me, so I just slipped the keys into the ignition and the gun into my lap. Cool metal impacting against hot. God, I hadn't been this hard in ages. It was almost more painful than pleasurable.

I kept my hand on the keys as I turned again and looked at him, but he was just sitting there stiffly, obviously uncomfortable, and I realized that he was expecting me to kill him. Despite what I'd said to him, what I'd admitted to him. Despite the evidence of my erection. Though, maybe, that just made him think I was an even greater pervert--that I was planning on giving it to him first before giving it to him last. It was probably all he really knew anymore. A reaping of what he had sown, dark seeds all.

With FBI a particularly delicious, angry and erotic blossom. Eccentric as all get out, too. In my time, it wouldn't have taken much and he'd have ended up in the stocks or worse. If he hadn't been the one to go gadding about doing the accusing and the hanging, of course. Obsession can go so many different ways.

Look what it was doing to this guy.

I looked away again and started the Charger. The steady roar was a poem to me, as lovely as the moon and the sway of stars overhead. The cry of the crickets it had drowned out. I turned on the headlights, illuminating dense woods and the silver flow of the water as it rushed past us at the bottom of the bank we were parked on. I backed us up slowly, then, not sure of whether there might be a drop-off of some kind in the tall grass. It made me a little pissed; the man sitting next to me could have so easily landed us in some ditch or racked up the bottom of the car with a rock or tree stump by what he'd done, the disrespectful son-of-a-bitch. I'd just put in two months solid work on this baby and he could have undone it all in a moment's inattention or misadventure. And he'd said he didn't believe in luck. I wondered how he felt about retribution.

Grass scraped along the bottom of the car as I slowly got it turned around and heading away from the river, stirring up a crowd of lightning bugs in the process. Luckily, the ground beneath seemed pretty hard and dry. As did the trail that opened up in front of the headlights at the last--so faint you couldn't really hardly call it a road, more of a track. It was full of loose rock and ruts and fallen branches and leaves. Narrowed even further by sprays of thorny-looking bushes and scrubby trees. It made me wonder how he'd found it in the first place, let alone known it would take him down to the river. Though it did kind of have the look of a place local teenagers might come to on the sly to neck and drink beer.

Another little mystery. I pondered it--and what I was doing and going to do with the man next to me--as I slowly drove down the track, wincing a bit everytime we slid down into a deeper rut or a bigger rock or branch was thrown up under the wheels. It was dark here, under the trees, out past the cut of the headlights. An older piece of forest, I imagined. Perhaps even one that had been here hundreds of years ago, one that had witnessed the passing of settlers and the drums and guns of the Civil War. I had stayed well out of that one; I'm not a fool for all those grand and glorious gestures of patriotism like some are, mortals and Immortals alike. I just do my bit for others and get on with it.

Bad enough the widows and orphans I had seen on both sides the Mason Dixon Line during those long years. Men bled and died and left folks hungry and homeless just the same whether they whistled "Dixie" or marched off to "John Brown's Body," better known today as a battle hymn that promised the North that God was on their side. I didn't trust any God who would take sides. Or any who would believe that He did.

Come to think of it, I didn't much believe in God anymore period. Belief has always seemed a quandary to me. Things change so very much over time and we either change with em or we don't. Either way, we lose out. We lose pieces of ourselves in the tides of Quickening after Quickening and we still lose those we come to care about, mortal and Immortal, to eventual and inevitable death.

Sorry about the sudden sad kick, but you know what I'm taking about. You've been around far longer than me. And are likely to be around a good while after I'm gone. I have no delusions about that. My fighting style sucks and always has, at least when it comes to swords. I'm a lover, not a fighter and don't give me that look. Just fill up my glass and let me get on telling you about it.

By the time we bumped up that last hill and over a railroad track, I could see the main road again and I could also see I was being a short-sighted idiot. First time for everything, you might say, even if you won't. There was no way I could trust my evil twin--tied up or no--and there was nothing I could say that would make him trust me. At least, not without coming clean. Putting him back in control. Taking that risk and that gamble I'd been talking about. That I'd been encouraging him to take.

So I was going to have to eat my own words. Live up to--or go down with--my own philosophy. Which was no prob, as long as I got something else to... um... eat because of it. I think it there was a "Conan" movie a few years back where one of the good guys said "you wanna live forever?" and then jumped off a building or something. Straight into the pit, as it were. Where there's always a big fucking snake guarding the gold and you gotta chop off its head before you can get away clean and... well, that metaphor seems kinda ass backwards, but you get the idea.

But first I was going to have to find us a playing ground. One where we wouldn't be disturbed. The road in front of us didn't look familiar, but I doubted asking Mr. Silent would help. I could still ask and then, if he answered, do the opposite, but I wasn't in the mood for that kinda game. I was in a hurry. The night wasn't going to last forever.

Finally, I just turned left and let the car swing out and back onto pavement. Let us pick up speed, heading straight towards that rising moon. A few desperate clouds had crept out by now and were trying to cover it, but it was shrugging them off no biggie, giving the sky and the road ahead of us a faint ghostly hue. Despite the situation, I got a kick out of it--it sure was a night for driving, the air having finally turned cool, almost crisp, and the sky so still you could almost feel the earth moving beneath you. I wished he could see it the way I did, could enjoy it as much as I did, but might has well ask for that old earth to stop turning.

The Charger obediently moved up another notch in speed without me really thinking about it and I opened my mouth briefly to taste the wind washing over my face. Sweet and silver and shit was it good to be alive. Again. Forever.

I glanced over at my companion, but he was staring straight out the windshield and the glow from the dashboard was making him look older again. Or maybe it was his complete lack of expression. Of anything. And that was another neat trick of his, albeit a little disturbing--to turn so completely nothing. I wished he'd stop showing it off to me, though. I'd gotten the idea the first time.

"Aren't you going to ask?" I said, easing up a bit on the gas. The road ahead of us curved and then curved again, sharp corners that I took with all the grace the Charger was capable of. The headlights skewed across dark trunks and slippery shadows. "Why I didn't stay dead?"

"Maybe," the nothingness next to me replied. "I don't want to know."

The road straightened out again and there was a bridge, possibly going over the same river he'd wanted to throw me into. We crossed it and came to a stopsign. I slowed the car and stopped and to my delight saw a roadsign that I recognized. I knew where we were now, at least when it came to simple geography.

"Then you're not like him," I said. "Mulder, I mean. He wanted to know." I turned right onto the new road and let the car go. This one was wider and smoother and I took us up to close to eighty before easing back again. The speed made conversation nearly impossible, but I didn't think he was interested in it much anyway. At least, he hadn't bothered replying to my last comment. And I was too busy grooving on the rush both the passing night and the vibrating engine were giving me. Too busy trying not the cream my own jeans. God, I really need to fuck and fuck bad. And like Ruffles I didn't think just once was going to be enough.

Even if I was lucky enough to get it.

We blew through another intersection--I didn't even pretend to stop this time--and I figured we were about half an hour from my skirt's place. Twenty minutes if I didn't let the speed drop much. Or if we didn't hit something or get pulled over. So I made my plea to Lady Luck and she came through like I knew she would. She knows I'm good for it.

Unfortunately, I still didn't have a plan worth squat. One that would get me what I wanted and get him what he needed--even if he didn't know it--and end up with us parting... well, if not friends, then at least not mortal enemies and pardon the expression, would you. Besides, despite having him at my mercy right now, I must admit that I'd much prefer to be at his. I'm just built that way. There's a word for it, but I'm not going to enlighten you if you don't already know it. And, besides, I've never forced myself on anyone in my life ever and I wasn't about to start now, no matter how tempting both sin and sinner were looking.

I'd let Mulder be in command and look what it'd gotten me. On the other hand, I was pretty damn sure if I had forced the issue with him at the time it would have likely turned as sour as a pail of witched milk. I'd figured that out right quick. You see, you gotta play it careful. Play it just right with someone like that. You just point him in the general direction and give him a little judicious encouragement and let nature take its course, trusting that it'll go straight to his... well, let's just say, more than ample endowments.

This guy might be the same but, then again, he might not and I didn't want to turn up dead twice in one night. No matter how cute my killer may be. And how much I wanted him. And I didn't think my Charger could take much more abuse. Well, it could, but I didn't want it to. So there.

So I'd mulled it around about six ways from Sunday by the time we got to our turn-off. As I paused to grab the mail from the mailbox standing next to the main road, tossed it in the back to share the seat with the duct tape, and then eased us gently down the winding lane. Luckily, my own special endowment had subsided a little by then, and was no longer straining the seams of my favorite pair of jeans, and so I could think a little more clearly.

Or as clearly as I ever thought, which you wouldn't say was much.

My guy still said nothing--big surprise, eh?--as I pulled up in front of the big A-frame and switched off the engine. The motion-sensitive lights had come up and they cast a warm glow over the cedar logs and the stone foundation. The windows were blind, though, reflecting only darkness. I should have left a light on, except that I hadn't known how long I would be. If, despite the case of champagne in the trunk, I'd be coming back at all. One never knew when one would be finding a better deal. Or have to take a quick skeedaddle out of town.

I snatched the gun back outa my lap and got out and stood next to the car, watching as my twin glanced around, checking out the area in quick little flicks of those sharp eyes. The house stood all alone--the three-car garage was tucked around out back--in the midst of thick woods. Woods as thick, or thicker, than the one he'd took me to dump the evidence. I could have told him just how secluded we were, especially since my girldoll and I had tested the limits of the property in just about every way imaginable. The nearest neighbor was more than five miles away and never heard the screams. Even the ones I'd made. So she was a hot babe when she wanted to be. With some of that extra special encouragement I was talking about.

I doubted this guy was much of a screamer, though. Even if it was pleasure instead of pain slam-dunking his little self into an adjoining universe.

"Home, sweet home," I commented. "So glad you could make it."

He shot me a sour look, then banished even that, sinking back into the car seat as if he expected moss to grow on him at any second. Oh yeah, return of the deadly non-responsive man. Sitting there in the car like some great lump as if expecting me to all the work of hauling his ass outa there. Or make the gun do it for me, anyway. But I was tired of threatening him.

Tired of the whole cruel scene to be honest.

Right now, I just wanted to get fucked half to death and curl up in a nice soft bed around something warm and cuddleable and watch the stars go out one by one. Watch the sun come up slowly over the trees. Hope he could make better coffee than I could. That he wouldn't hog all the hot water or expect me to loan him my toothbrush.

Told you I'm a romantic at heart. Hell, right about now I'd probably forgive this guy the toothbrush and the hot water, and even the fucking coffee, as long as he got my rocks off. To see if I could see some part of myself in those eyes of his. Even if his own hard-on came with Special Agent Fox Mulder written all over it.

I walked around to his side of the car and opened the door for him, gentleman that I was. Swung it wide and stepped back. Then gestured at him with the deadly end of the gun, gentleman that I wasn't.

"C'mon," I said. "We're both not getting any younger." And I'm not getting any older, but I won't tattle if you won't.

His head turned slowly towards me. His eyes came up at the same time, steady, burning from beneath smoky black lashes. "So, why didn't you?" he asked, picking up from where we'd left off with the nonchalance of someone who didn't give a fuck. "Die, I mean."

I looked back at him, keeping my own gaze just as direct. "Because I can't," I answered. So it wasn't precisely true, but I wasn't going to give every last secret away no matter how nicely he asked. Not even if it would help satisfy a particularly tempting narcissistic fantasy of mine, one that would put most folks to shame. That would give a whole new meaning to playing with yourself.

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice hushed--not giving away whether he felt sorry for me or for himself.

I gave him a tight-lipped little grin. "I'm not."

He held my eyes for a moment longer, then deliberately looked away and worked his way up and out of the car seat. He stood there and looked up at the house, as if he didn't care to look anywhere else--particularly at me--right now. As if he was too busy sorting puzzle pieces in his head, trying to form some kind of picture he could live with. Maybe even one that I could die with.

"Go on up," I said, rather more gently. "I'll be right behind you."

He shot me a look, one that fell to the gun still in my hand, and then started walking towards the front porch of the cabin. I watched him for a second or two, then turned away and reclaimed the day's mail from the backseat. I thought about taking the duct tape with me, too, but decided in the end to let it lie. The case of champagne in the trunk could wait, too. My guest was not a man of boundless patience and he'd likely try and take advantage if I came staggering up to the front door with a case of the stuff in my arms. And it'd cost me too much to go and get it smashed up along with various parts of my own anatomy.

Still, maybe I was misjudging him, since he was just standing there next to the front door like a reluctant salesman when I came up the steps. Without even being asked, he moved back as I approached and let me at the door. Keeping half an eye on him, I unlocked it and went part way inside. I hit the switch for the big overhead light and then disarmed the alarm system from the box right next to it. He came in just as the alarm went to green and I caught him giving it a sideways glance, before he slowly walked out into the middle of the room.

I closed the door and leaned back against it, watching him take it in.

It was a lovely place, kind of like one I'd had myself a few years back, but much bigger and with scads more windows, all the better for its owner to paint by.

She had decorated it in rustic and earth tones for the most part. Old copper pots and cooking utensils hung from the huge stone fireplace that graced one wall of the great room. Plants in various baskets and porcelain pots lined the other walls, including one miniature orange tree. All the furniture was comfortable, oak carved pieces upholstered in reds and greens and golds with matching antique embroidered footstools. A white wicker rocking chair sat by the stairs that led to the second floor, right next to a big oak cupboard that hid the downstairs t.v. and the stereo system. The couple of paintings scattered about were all her own, including her latest finished piece. It was larger than any other she had so far attempted and was displayed on a stand just beyond the rocker, well away from the light. It, too, was all in earth tones--a woman standing on a lakeshore at dusk, a white swan swimming just before her. Both of them were mirrored in the water, the arch of her hands almost perfectly mimicking the arch of the swans' neck. At this distance, it almost looked like a photograph, the strokes were so fine. She'd spent most of the last year working on it and it was going to be the centerpiece of a show she had planned for next month in a small New York gallery.

If I was still here, I would probably end up going with her. Do the dutiful boyfriend thing. Drink moderately expensive wine and carry around one of those little plates of finicky food and try and make nicey nice conversation with folks who had more money than sense.

"Nice place," my companion finally commented. Second nature by now, I checked his tone for sarcasm and found none. Amazing.

I looked at him, but he was crossing the room to stand in front of the painting, close enough to check out the technique and yet far enough away to still catch the effect. He knew what he was doing and it made his disheveled look and bound hands all the more incongruous.

I tossed the mail on the coffee table in front of the couch and walked over towards him. But not too close. Not holding the gun on him, but not pointing it away either.

"Yeah," I said. "It is that. Nice."

He looked at me from beneath those lowered lashes again and suddenly he looked cold and weary and rather ragged around the edges, like an expensive silk rug that someone hadn't bothered much with and mistreated all to hell. Like he'd been stepped on and used and wrung out time and again until all the threads had started to come undone. Maybe, it was just the contrast with the warmth and simple comfort of the room we were standing in, but I didn't think he'd had much of the like lately. If ever. Possibly, it was something going around--FBI had looked tired, too. Tired and sad and down on his luck and I guess I was always a sucker for shit like that. For the needy. The charity case.

Not that either of them would likely appreciate that particular sentiment.

Still, the warmth inside me abruptly changed and I let out a soft breath. One that immediately caught his attention, though he hid it well. Carefully, he looked back at the painting and studied it as if he had all the time in the world, not a care to his name.

"Go sit down," I said, gesturing with hand holding the gun at one of the antique footstools.

He shot me another dark and subtle look, then did as I asked, settling down stiffly on the indicated seat. His back straight and his head raised. I came up behind him and watched him tense up and then, quite deliberately, release that same tension. Like I said, an admirable talent.

Still, I felt him trembling a little as I pressed the barrel of the gun into his back and then trailed it slowly down the length of his spine. Sliding the metal over slick leather. Leaning in even closer as I reached the bottom and it dropped into the small of his back. Up this close, I could see just all too clearly how that black jacket that suited him so well was as worn and thin around the edges as his t-shirt and jeans. I could smell him, too--day's old sweat and the even muskier scent of desperation, the faint tang of something I easily identified as gun oil. Dank scents all, like something left for too long in the dark.

"Hold still," I whispered.

I felt more than heard him swallow. "Whatever."

His shoulders slumped a little when I pulled the gun away. I stuffed it back into my own jeans, then grabbed his hands and began working on the tape, unwinding what I had wound up before. He didn't fight me, but he didn't help me either and I could only imagine what might be going through his head right now. Probably right at the top of the list was how he could turn this to his advantage. How he could take me down.

I could have told him precisely how I'd like it.

When his hands were finally clear, though, I just dropped the tangle of silver tape on the floor and stepped back, pulled the gun out again. He got up slowly and turned to face me, then made an abortive move towards raising his hands. One that died as I shook my head at him. His eyes flashed as I slipped the safety back on the gun. Flashed even brighter as I abruptly tossed the .38 directly at him.

"Here," I said.

He snatched it out of mid-air cleanly and neatly. Brought it up directly, aimed and ready again, a half second later. Smooth and quick. Nice and deadly reflexes, almost as good as some Immortals I've met. Present company not excluded.

"Go on then, if your heart's really set on it, I said quietly. "Gwen'll freak, but I'll explain the blood away somehow." I stared directly into those eyes and gave them a little smile, sad but sweet. One of my best martyr looks if I have to say so myself and I usually have to. "Oh yeah, just to let you know--there's a keyring with a little silver heart on it by the back door and a matching BMW in the garage. Feel free. Just don't take the Charger, okay? And leave the lights on when you go. I hate like hell to wake up in the dark."

The gun didn't waver, but I could see a hint of confusion in his eyes now. Poor boy--obviously he wasn't used to trusting anyone, let alone strangers. Even ones who wore his own face. Maybe, especially ones who wore his own face and had already shown him they knew some of his secrets. Had a rather intimate and salacious knowledge of one of his secrets.

I let my smile fade; it seemed to be one of the things disturbing him. "Or," I said slowly. "There is a spare bedroom upstairs. You can stay if you want, and either take the car or have me drop you off somewhere tomorrow. Your choice. But it is awful fucking late..."

I shrugged, but he just stood there, the gun still held on me and his face so utterly expressionless it was almost eerie. Like part of him had been stolen away while I wasn't looking. Only his eyes gave away the game. And they weren't much better. I could see how they were hurting, how very tired they were and how sad and I wished...

Well, I fucking wish for a lot of things and some of them I actually have the audacity to get, but I wasn't sure about this one. Despite the promise of the night and the madness that a full moon usually engendered. Maybe, I would be lucky just to emerge unscathed once the dawn came. Unscathed and with a cup of freshly-brewed coffee to look forward to.

He was still standing there--uncertain as all hell and twice as dangerous--when I took my chance and turned away, turned my back on him and his gun and headed towards the stairs. "Well... whatever," I said, mimicking his tone almost exactly. "I'm going up to bed. Do whatever you like, Alex Krycek. Just keep it down to a dull roar if you please."

I was tensed to feel the familiar and fatal impact of a bullet almost the whole way up the stairs and only felt myself relax inside as I turned on the upper landing to go down the darkened hall beyond. I was tired, too--though not as tired as my guest, if appearances weren't deceiving--and, right now, the thought of pouring myself down between a clean set of sheets, with or without company, was a siren's call of comfort.

I turned on the light in the hall, just in case he actually took me up on my offer, and opened the door to the guest bedroom and invitingly left the light on there as well. Then I took a short pitstop in the bathroom to piss and brush my teeth and went on down to the master bedroom at the far end of the hall. Shucking my clothes off with only the sparse light from the hall to guide me. Grimacing as I saw the dirt on them, the blood, the scattering of holes and rips. They stank, too, of my own sweat and of other less savory things and I pitched both jeans and shirt in the far corner. The jeans could likely be washed and reclaimed, but the silk shirt was a total ruin.

Almost as bad as my pair of leopard-print briefs. They were soggy in the front and looked rather lonesome and forlorn as I stripped them off and tossed them after the rest of my clothes. My friend had gone about half-way back down by now, making him look rather lonesome as well, but I shook my head at both him and myself and just closed the door to the bedroom and finally turned down the bed and slipped inside. And, shit, it felt good, but I knew what would have felt better.

Not that I would be getting it tonight unless I gave it to myself and, after all my long hopes and dreams to the opposite, I just wasn't in the mood for making do.

So I turned to my side and tried to relax, to let myself--and it--go. Thinking of nothing, but soon realizing that part of me was, in fact, listening. Straining to hear the sound of footsteps in the hall or the muffled roar of a car starting out back, but there was nothing and nothing. Just the usual quiet that surrounded and filled this house. That and the silver moonlight coming in softly through the wide bank of windows along the left side of the bed. It made me feel adrift in it, in a sea of white sheets and silence. So far from home...

So far...

I must have slept a little, because I suddenly found myself wide-awake, starting up in the bed, staring out into darkness. Or at a figure standing in the darkness. Standing silent as sin at the foot of Gwen's king size bed.

The moon must have finally succumbed to the clouds, because I couldn't see anything about him, not even a flash of that pale skin. Just an outline and a presence, breathing so softly I might have thought I was imagining it. Imagining him.

But I couldn't have imagined that voice, not even in my dearest fantasies.

"Cory," it said, a broken husk of a voice. "Tell me... Mulder... he..."

"Yes," I breathed as it wound down to an even greater nothingness. To a pain so sharp it could have eviscerated you before you had even chance to notice. Not until it was too late, when your guts were already hanging out for everyone to see.

"Yes," I repeated again as the shadow moved even closer, sliding around the corner of the bed, heading towards me with a glide that soon turned to a stutter, to a stumble, to a fall. I caught him as he fell onto the bed, onto me, and held him and he was naked and cold to the touch and trembling. Trembling so hard I wondered if he was crying, except that his face was dry when I touched it. When I lifted his face to mine.

I was going to kiss him, but he beat me to the punch. And that was definitely the word for it.

He kissed me hard, with all the subtlety of a machine gun, quick staccato kisses that bruised my lips and jaw and cheekbones. As if he'd made a weapon of seduction, or had it made for him. His hands came up and pressed me down into the sheets, holding me for his mouth, for the teeth that skated down the arch of my neck and across the bone and muscle of my shoulders. He wasn't drawing blood, but it was close.

Close enough as nearly made no difference.

And maybe I should have slowed it down, asked questions, pondered this sudden change of heart, but fuck since when has that been my style. Time enough for recriminations in the morning, at the very least you should have something worthwhile to recriminate about. Gotta have sins for the Almighty to forgive in the first damn place or what kind of redemption is it anyway? A fucking piss poor one, that's all I gotta say.

So I gave myself over to it--to him--as if I hadn't been scheming and moaning for it all night. Since even before I'd first seen him in that bar, all hard-eyed and hard-assed and in sad need of some new friends. If not a whole new life.

I let him restrain me, hold me beneath strong arms and strong fingers as he moved down to lick at the planes of my chest, circling first one nipple and then the other. Alternating a rough tongue with sharp teeth, all lick and bite and little flicks up and down and around and back over each sensitive nub. Sending burning bits of pain and pleasure both all through me, like hot ash swirling on the wind. Spiraling up and then dropping down, betraying the still-smoking embers of the banked fire below.

I could feel his own cock against my thigh and it was hard as mine had been half the night. Hot as he was cold. And though he wasn't sweating right now, I could still smell it on him and it sent an even deeper jangle of need and want through me, one that had me pushing my own cock up into his flesh.

His fingers tightened and then his breath was brushing across my face. I opened my mouth and he went down on it, his tongue sliding in like a blade to the sheath, all edge and slick metal. It was a possessive little bastard, touching and stroking and claiming every last bit of me, all but choking off my air. Making my head spin with both lack and excess.

A little whimper escaped me, stealing the last of my breath away and he pulled back a touch. Regarding me with eyes I could feel even if I couldn't see them. His grip loosened and I reached up, reached out to him, and brought him back down. And I kissed him this time, making it just as possessive, but far more gentle. A long slow tasting of every available surface. A drinking of the dark cup being offered me, broken edges and all.

I let one hand creep out and across his back, stroking over smooth skin and the occasional faint ridge of a scar. My fingers found and followed the line of his spine and he shivered against me and I drank down the sound he made as well. The half-mumbled curse as my hand sank into the small of his back and began a slow circling motion there, just there.

He pulled his mouth away from mine and buried his face into my neck and, after a moment or two--as if resisting the motion or maybe just his need for it--he began thrusting down against my leg, slowly, but all the more desperately because of it. I moved my other hand up and threaded fingers through his hair, short as it was, feeling the fragile strength of the skull beneath. Holding his head to me as he pushed against me, as I began pushing my fingers into his back on each downstroke, urging him on. Urging him to completion, if that's what he wanted. What he had to have.

It need go no more than this, if that's all he could take. If that was all he dared give me, to trust me with--a stranger, an enigma. If I was simply to be a warm and welcoming body in the night. Someone he wouldn't have to look at, wouldn't have to see, yet who would know the face and form of the man he was really fucking. In his mind. In his heart. As if by fucking the man who'd fucked him once, it might be just enough to afford him some relief. Especially since it might be the closest he might ever get to the real thing, considering what a cold and impartial universe he lived in.

That they both lived in, the beautiful fools...

But he was already winding down, gasping against my throat, losing the rhythm he had managed to build to something that sounded suspiciously like sobs. Dry racking sounds that brought tears to my own eyes, if not to his.

"Shhhh..." I whispered. Not daring any other sound, but wanting to give him something. Wanting to let him know it was okay. Not all right, but okay.

He was limp to the touch, unresisting, as I closed my arms around him and slowly rolled us up in the sheets. I covered that cold body with my own warmth and smiled a little as I felt his cock tuck up against mine, my own hardening even further in an instant, as if a spark had jumped between the two, a contagion.

I lowered my head and licked at that jawline, tasting unshaven flesh and unwashed skin. Tasting the darkness he was hidden in. The darkness he kept so closely inside him. I followed it down to his throat--feeling the pulse of his life, sure and heavy with blood, beneath my lips--and then moved on again as he shifted slightly against me, obviously uncomfortable. Uneasy. I used those tiny abortive movements as a guide as I proceeded down and down, never pausing too long, but pausing all the same. Mouthing each nipple in turn, pressing the tip of my tongue into the clever little whirl of his navel. Sweat had gathered there as well and I licked it all up, licked it clean.

His movements became choppier, more uncertain, as I moved on, running my face through crisp dark hair, licking at the tender skin of his inner thighs. As if he couldn't make up his mind whether to pull away or push back, whether he could or couldn't stand it--my touch, my gentleness, my demand. But part of him knew better, knew what it wanted, and it bobbed towards me as I rose up to my elbows over it. As I breathed on it, a long slow exhalation. Even in this dim light I could see a glistening drop of moisture on the very tip.

He was cut as FBI had been cut--as most men were these days--and it proved my suspicions that the two of them had never been familiar in any fashion, no matter their desires to the contrary. Otherwise, our mutual hazel-eyed-boy would have known right from the start that I wasn't his man.

Even blindsided by lust, you couldn't miss something like that. As possibly the only real and incriminating way to differentiate us, though, it had its advantages; you already might be in rather... ahem, intimate circumstances before you discovered your faux pas and, by then, it might prove to be beyond rectification.

The sound he made when I went down on him was one of both relief and negation and his hands came down and tried to push me away at almost the same time that he thrust up into my mouth. But, whereas one was a weak effort, easily shrugged off, the other was not. It was uncontrollable. Steel and fire all at once, the blood swelling into thick veins as sure and heavy as the pulse I'd felt at his throat. Heavier, maybe.

He tasted of the bitter dark and of salt. Like slow-moving river water meeting and mingling with the quick wash of the ocean, all browns and deep blue and gritty with little bits of life and decay. I took it all in, feeling the head butt against the back of my throat, then slipped slowly back upwards and brought my tongue into play down one of those straining veins. Up under that bare ridge of flesh. So exposed, so vulnerable, and so very responsive.

His hips rose and fell. Not a rhythm--it was too erratic for that--but, this time, when his hands settled on me, they pushed me to take him in again. To suck him all the way back down.

I did as he asked. Just my easy-going nature, I guess. I spread my hand down around the root of his cock and pressed down, holding him in place, as I lowered my head until I could feel the blunt head hit the back of my throat again, until my face was all but buried in that thick patch of hair. As I started a rhythm this time, slow and sure and steady. Moving up and down on his length, letting the tip of his cock rub over and over the ridges on the top of my mouth as I took it from lips to throat and back again, using the edges of my teeth and tongue to keep things interesting at odd intervals.

He had gone silent now, but if anything that was even more revealing. One of his hands had fallen to my shoulder and was digging in, as if he was forcing himself not to try and grasp my head, to take back control of the situation. To make me do what I was already doing to him.

His cock was growing even hotter and harder under my attentions and I could taste him again, flecks of darkness on my tongue that created a matching spots of blindness in my head. That made my own cock twitch and dance.

And I would have let him go all the way right then and there. Would have let him come and been... well, if not content with that, at least satisfied. But he obviously wasn't content with it, because that hand abruptly left my shoulder and brushed through my hair. And he pulled back from my mouth as far as he could. Enough to give me the hint.

I gave that silky-hard cock one last lick and then released him. Raised my head to look at him. And I could swear I saw him looking down at me, that I could see the hard glitter of his eyes. Could even see their color, green as moss. Almost the exact shade that FBI's had gone when he'd slammed me down and stuck my cock in-between those sweet killer-vicious lips of his like some kinda all-night sucker and stuck a couple of those long fingers up my...

Oh, sorry. Got a little carried away again there.

Hey, you can always leave if you wanta, or tell me to stop. But... if you wanta stay, why don't you pop the top on that second bottle over there and refresh this baby and I'll just ignore anything that might present itself in the meantime that you don't exactly wanta admit to. I'm good at that. You don't tell me. I won't tell you. Besides, we're all just friends here. Well, sorta. All right, so we're not exactly friends, but what the hey? Don't have to be best buds to share some bubbly and a whirl in the pool.

Doesn't hurt, though.

Thanks, and where was I? Oh, yeah.

He still wasn't talking, but I knew what he was saying, anyway. What he wanted.

The same thing I did.

I rolled up and off the bed and opened the drawer of the night stand, rummaging around inside mostly by feel until I chanced across the right slender tube among all the other toys--one or two of my own and the rest my girldoll's--and turned back.

He had pushed himself to a sitting position and was leaning back against the headboard, one knee slightly raised and his hands spread loosely out to either side of him. He was mostly line and shadow, but I could see the faint glimmer of his eyes and knew he was watching me. Could hear the slight rasp of his breath, quickened but still under control. More under control than when he'd first appeared in my bedroom. Maybe, under enough control to be reconsidering. To change his mind.

Still, he didn't move, didn't react at all, as I climbed back up onto the bed. Not approaching him, not touching him. Just in case.

"Alex...?" I asked, my voice hardly more than a whisper.

For a long moment or two, there was nothing. More of that absence of self he was so damn good at. Then, finally, his head lifted a little and the fingers on his right hand moved, shifted. Opened.

"It was my job," he said, a hollow sound. Hollow words. "I didn't want... I..."

"Yeah," I said and now it was a whisper. A comfort that I knew he wouldn't take even as I offered it. "I know."

"But he..." That rigid control cracked once more, shattering up and down a certain fault line. "Mulder, he... I didn't do it. I couldn't... but he... oh God, he fucking hates me."

"Maybe," I breathed. "Maybe not. Alex..."

I moved towards him, slowly and gently, and he didn't pull away, but he didn't respond either as I pulled him up and into my arms and held him. Just held him. His head tucked into the side of my neck and my cheek to his hair, silky smooth no matter how it had been butchered so obscenely short. Despite the evidence of his hard-on, his skin was chilled, almost icy to the touch. As if the cold had somehow gotten into his bones and was freezing him up from the inside out.

"C'mon," I said. "Let's get under the covers."

I imagine you've heard the phrase about all cats being grey in the dark. Well, darkness is also the time and place for confessions, both to self and to others. Sometimes of things you'd never in a million years admit to in the light. Even to those who most need to hear it.

I shifted him and, once more, he didn't resist. And I wrapped him up again, tightly as I could, this time in sheets and blankets and my own warm flesh, pulling him half on top of me and twisting my legs around his. The result was pretty much the same as when I'd restrained him with the duct tape, though--he was silent and unresponsive, tense as a wire pulled nearly to the breaking point.

When I just ran a hand experimentally down his arm--deliberately staying away from other more potentially volatile areas--he flinched away from even that slight attempt to soothe him, and I was almost sure I could feel goosebumps rising in the wake of my fingers. So I let my hand go still and just laid there with him. His head had come to rest on my chest and I could feel the occasional flutter of his eyelashes against my own skin as he blinked, the soft brush of his breath over the hollow where neck met shoulder. A vulnerable spot on mortal and Immortal alike and it gave me my own goosebumps. My own internal shivers.

I don't know how long we just laid there, before I felt him shift a little. Before I felt his hand slide in under a fold of blanket and between us and come to rest on my upper leg. Felt it pause there and then, slowly and carefully as the tread of a thief, creep inwards and upwards until a couple of fingers brushed across the length of my cock in passing.

I held perfectly still, even as those same fingers came back a few seconds later, as if only then realizing what they'd found, and closed on it. Not a bruising grip, but nothing like a gentle one either. As if they weren't about to let it get away. They squeezed down and then relaxed and then squeezed again, harder this time.

At least one layer of sheets had ended up between his own cock and me, but I could still feel the solid weight of it beginning to stir against my thigh even as I was stirring. Rising up beneath his fingers, filling them.

"Cory...?" I heard him whisper. Felt the words and the need against the line of my neck. "Would you... can I...?"

"Sure, babydoll," I whispered back. "Whatever you want. Whatever you need."

I thought about telling him about the cats and about how I understood. Really understood. But I guess it wasn't my night to confess. Besides, once I opened that door there might be a few other things jumping to line up for their fifteen minutes of fame--like the fact that I kinda liked the bastard and more than kinda felt sorry for him. And, worst of all, that I even felt there could be, maybe and maybe and if given its own slender chance at stardom, more than that between us. Certainly more than the fact that we happened to share the same face. That, due to that same face, I had already fallen into his life and been doomed to his death once upon a time like Alice gone full-tilt down the rabbit hole.

Though, luckily, Mr. Smokes hadn't thought to try the Red Queen's remedy on me at the time or it would have been a truly fatal case of mistaken identity.

Narcissistic, yeah. But familiar and appealing outer package not withstanding, I had admit to a certain intrigue of the inner, a desire to see more of just what made my lookalike tick. Call it a quirk of the full moon tonight or just the fact that I can't seem to live too long in some place without eventually getting bored enough to bring trouble down around my ears. Or maybe--to be altruistic--you could even say it has something to do with the fact that I never could stand to see someone in pain without trying to do something about it, no matter how much it might end up costing me in the long run.

Not that I thought a guy like this would ever stand for, let alone appreciate, a pity fuck.

And not that that's what I wanted to give him. Oh sure, I pitied him a little. Even if he had dug himself into the hole he was currently in mostly on his own initiative. But that's not why I wanted to fuck him. Or, rather, have him fuck me, all things considered.

Because the simple, obvious, easy on the eye truth--if that's what you wanta hear--is that I guess I've just always been attracted to the bad boys. Even more so than those damn upstanding self-righteous types who need taking down a peg or two. Who pretend towards that white-hat when they're really as grey as the rest of us. And I'm not gonna name any names so get that expectant look off your face.

But this bad boy had my bad boy well in hand, quite literally. He had turned his head and was kissing my chest now, as well--half-kisses, half-licks--and it made me wonder if he could taste my own heart beating. Was savoring its quickening, the betrayal of my own increasing need. As if the cock teasing with his fingers wasn't already giving me away. Big time.

This time, he was the one who shifted, who slid further over on top of me. And that mouth slowly traveled higher, leaving a moist and tingling trail up my neck and along the line of my jaw. Kissing cheekbone and the ridge of first one eye and then the other. Even the tip of my nose, the one that Amanda had always called "cute." Well, since the word was first invented, anyway.

They were thorough kisses, almost as much tongue as lips, but they seemed to be deliberately avoiding the one place that had already parted for them. The blatant invitation of my own mouth.

Yeah, quite the bastard, but I'd forgive him the one slight if he never stopped with those clever-cruel fingers of his. At least, not for a century or two. Hard and relentless, they worked unceasingly at me, long slow strokes that rubbed from tip to root, not missing an inch of skin. Taking advantage of the juices that he had already milked clean out of me.

A couple of small moans seemed to catch his attention and he raised his head and looked down at me. Not that I was the culprit. Oh no, I didn't know who the hell was making those noises, but whoever it was they sure sounded tormented.

Even in the dark, his eyes seemed to glitter as he abruptly lowered his head again and sealed my mouth shut with his own in one quick, almost feral gesture. Plunging his tongue in completely at the same time, sliding it down over my own and deep as it could go. And pure sugar had never been half as sweet, or given me such a rush. His mouth was soft and hard at the same time and it made my head spin like a drum majorette. Or was that, in fact, my cock spinning? Being twirled around demanding, yet forgiving, nimble and practiced fingers?

I couldn't resist it; I let my own tongue slink up and into his mouth, sly thing that it was, and steal some of that sugar directly. The taste and texture racing through my blood, starting to boil in my veins. And it was fire, he was fire, but a fire that masqueraded itself as much as ice. So damn fucking cold it seared and smoked as much as burnt and... shit, but I had to get away from those fingers or it was going to be over before it'd even begun.

I pushed him away slightly, unlocking our mouths from each other, and just settled back beneath his weight, gasping for air. He raised his head again and I could feel his own rapid breathing giving him away. That and the insistent pressure of his cock against my leg.

Abruptly, he gave up that tight grip on my own cock and struggled to sit up, pulling himself free of both me and the bedclothes. He climbed to his knees near the end of the bed and roughly yanked on the sheets and blankets, tipping me out of them almost nonchalantly in the process, before turning to one side and throwing it all off the bed with a somewhat impatient gesture.

Leaving me naked and alone in the sudden expanse of an empty bed. Alone, except for him.

The moon took that moment to lift her veil of clouds and it made the single remaining white sheet beneath us almost glow. It gave his skin a soft and silver nimbus as well, a false patina that highlighted the shadows cast by the tilt of his head, the angle of his knees. The arch of his back and throat.

The one hand that had come to rest on his upper leg, tight-fisted, the knuckles pressed inward in a hard line to the skin.

And, despite the moon, I could still only see part of him. As if he couldn't quite help himself. Couldn't help but keep back pieces of himself. To stay in the shadows. As if it had long become a habit. Perhaps, even an addiction. Not that he didn't belong to it, that it didn't suit him--the darkness, that certain watchful stillness he seemed so capable of wrapping himself up inside, the walls that masked him, devouring anything that remotely might be considered vulnerable. All that which might make him seem human.

Strange isn't it? How some mortals can seem more alien to their own kind than those of us who share this world with them. Who aren't even sure just how human we ourselves are, despite having been born of mortal parents.

Strange and almost sad.

Not that I hadn't seen even this unnatural control crack once or twice already tonight, hadn't seen a hint of what it hid, of the anguish and the longing that it covered, but now he seemed to have himself well in hand once more. As if he were to some extent aware of his earlier lapses, he had turned away slightly from the windows and the moonlight, masking both expression and intent. Oddly, the angle at which he was kneeling even managed to disguise the space between his spread thighs, where it hid everything except for the precise tip of his arched and stiffened cock.

And it was as beautiful seeming a pose as it was deadly; he looked like a statue, all white stone and carved calculation, cool and eminently unapproachable. An illusion that was only marred slightly as he glanced down, as his shoulders slumped a little, just a shade. Then he bent down even further a half second later and picked up that tiny tube I'd scrounged out of the nightstand, palming it with a quick gesture that made me wonder if he didn't have some experience as a thief himself. Or, at least, the natural talent for it.

The tube must have fallen out of the tumble of sheets and blankets, but I suppose you could forgive me for not noticing it until after he did. For not being able to see much of anything else right now. No matter how important it might prove to be. And, maybe, I was more than a bit blinded, especially when he looked up again and his eyes caught at me. Held me. Luminous with the moon and with something else I couldn't quite define.

And I found myself holding my breath as he put his hands down to the bed and crawled back up to me, smooth and sinuous movements that made my heart jump and skitter inside my chest like some small and terrified creature.

He didn't touch me, though. Only turned and stretched himself out just a few inches away from me, his head pillowed on the curve of arm. And he was all white limbs against white sheets. All sleek hair and unshaven skin. Hollow-eyed and unsmiling and a bit damp about the edges. Musky-dark. Like black ice and gnawed bones and things better left alone.

Better left untouched.

"Cory..." he said, not a question, but not exactly a demand either.

I turned to my own side and faced him. Then found myself smiling just a little, despite or maybe because of my own sense of his danger, of what I was about to let him do to me; it was absurd, but laid out like this we must have looked like a pair of almost perfectly matched bookends. A set of art deco or art nouveau nudes, perfect for propping up that rather large, dog-eared and entirely too risque collection of erotic paperbacks that you'd otherwise never admit to owning.

Not that we were perfectly alike. Oh, no. But the differences were so minor that they were almost indistinguishable, at least by this light. And I found myself suddenly amazed, almost dazzled by it, even after having a few hours to adjust, a few months to consider. What I didn't want to admit to was that I also was finding it to be a trifle unnerving as well. At how we could be so very similar on the outside, yet so dissimilar within.

They say that God is in the details. But that holds true for classic cars, as well, so what does that say?

I wasn't going to ask and he wasn't likely to tell.

So instead, I just looked deeply into a pair of eyes so like my own, and so unlike at the same time, and then slowly and quite deliberately turned over. Lowered myself down on my stomach on that vast and empty bed and laid my hands up by my face, palms downwards. I spread my legs slightly, cool air sliding between them, and waited, listening to nothing more than the sound of my own heart beating. Listening to the silence.

The bed didn't hardly shift at all as the man next to me finally came towards me. As he moved to straddle me, hard thighs coming down and surrounding my own. His weight settling on top of me. There was even less warning as one hand drifted down to touch first my neck and then my shoulder blade, to trail the tips of just two fingers lightly as a falling leaf over my spine. Less than a caress, but more than simple curiosity, it left me shivering.

I closed my eyes and drifted with the sensation. As they moved lower and lower, never slowing, never stopping, until they reached the small of my back. I didn't even move as they left and then returned a few moments later, this time even cooler, slicked with gel and intent. Sliding between easily parted flesh towards the greater shadows. Gliding down into the depths of my heat, over even more sensitive and shivering skin, until they'd found what they'd known was there. What was waiting for them.

One finger entered me easily, going in almost all the way to the knuckle on one sure stroke. My heart skipped a beat in response and I bit back a gasp. He immediately withdrew it a little and then pressed in again, slowly turning it inside me. Reaching for something he knew was there. That I knew was there. And, despite that, despite myself, I still jumped and choked as he caught it. As the tip of that finger circled and stroked and then abruptly pressed full down on it, driving a bright line of heat up along the ridge of my spine. It impacted a second later at the back of my head, sending showers of sparks off in all directions behind my eyelids, and distantly I heard myself moan.

I wasn't sure if it was a name or a request. Maybe, a bit of both.

Either way, he pressed again, harder this time, and the sparks turned to a full-fledged explosion, to a shower of stars. One that cascaded through my nerves, making me thrust my cock involuntarily down into the embrace of the bed, that turned that moan into an actual cry this time. Though whether it was more pain or pleasure, who can tell? That's also as may be in the details.

When I settled back at last, panting a little, I realized that he'd slid a second finger into me. That I hadn't even hardly noticed. They weren't going as deep, this time, but they were steadily and surely opening me up. Spreading heated slickness all through me.

Making me want even more. All of it. As much as I could get.

I pushed back onto them as hard as I could, only to have them snatched away from me. To have his weight shift and come down on me fully, pressing my cock almost painfully tight against my stomach. One hand moved up and slid along the line of my arm, until it reached my wrist. His fingers circling it, digging in, imprisoning me.

Then I felt him lift up a little and knew he had grasped his cock, was guiding it towards me. Instead of just shoving it right in, though, he began rubbing the head up and down over that tender skin as if intent on simply letting me feel just how hard he was, how very hot. The head, especially--a liquid heat, marking me with his own slick juices. As he would soon fill me with the rest of it, with an even greater warmth.

Just when I didn't think I could take anymore, he suddenly stopped and held it, held himself there, poised and ready. And I could hear his own harsh breathing, could feel the strain in all his limbs, as he fought with his control. With himself. And I could only imagine the battle raging inside him, inside that desperate control--between anger and self-pity, disgust and hurt and hopeless desire. He didn't really want me, but he couldn't have what he wanted, and that made him angry. And the fact that it made him angry, that it could get to him like that, made him disgusted and sorry for himself at the same time. Made him want to break down and cry. To scream.

To hurt someone or something. Anything. Even himself.

And you may ask how I knew this, but in that bright and sparkling moment I knew everything. Even as his fingers dug into the bones of my wrist, as he lowered his head that last little distance between us to let it rest on my back. As I heard his own gasps and felt his trembling all through me. His uncertainty and his need. His hatred of giving in to it.

So, maybe, my silk shirt hadn't been enough of a sacrifice.

"What's the matter?" I whispered. "You think he's gonna care if you save yourself for him? Let me tell you... undying devotion's not all it's cracked up to be."

His next breath came out a little ragged, as if it'd gotten caught on his teeth. "You shit," I heard him say and that too was ragged, half angry and half rueful.

I turned my head a little, but couldn't see him. "Takes one to know one." So it was a juvenile response, yeah, but sometimes that's for the best. Cuts right to that snot-nosed and hopelessly insecure inner child they're always talking about these days.

The next breath was even more ragged, but in a whole new way. Abruptly, his head turned and I felt first his lips and then his teeth. And, this time, I think he did draw blood with those suckers. They scored across my back, then tried for my exposed ear. I turned my head away before they could sink home and he let out a long hiss of air.

"Shit," he said again and then his hand tightened down on my wrist and he pushed himself against me, not roughly, but certainly hard. Forcefully. And, despite the lube, it burned a little as he sank in several inches. As he pulled back just a hair and shoved in again, not giving me time to adjust. Going in more than just a few inches, this time. Going in far enough that I felt a brief brush of the prickly hair at the base of his cock, before he pulled back out again and shoved home once more.

Holding himself there as he bent his head again and bit at me, as his other hand came up and slid beneath me, slid around my waist. "Up," he snarled. "Get up."

Before I could begin to do as he asked, though, he was already pulling at me, lifting me to a semi-crouched position. Knocking my legs wider apart beneath him and letting more of his weight land on me. I turned my head again, knowing what it would do to my neck but not caring, having to see him. To watch him.

And I wasn't disappointed--his face was almost savage in that light, his lips drawn back and his eyes narrowed slightly, more dark now than luminous. As if to put the moon out. They caught me looking at him and turned even more fierce in that moment, fierce as the thrust he made inside me without warning. One that wrung a gasp out of me, that made my own eyes go half-closed.

I don't know if it was the new angle, but I could feel him even deeper inside me at that point and I felt completely helpless beneath the sheer size and depth of the sensation, helpless to do anything but squirm beneath my impalement. To dig my own hands down into the bedsheet, twisting it up and away from the mattress. His was a bleak and profound need and I could feel every inch of it, every contradiction--his cock still and hot and pure even as the man himself was cool, distant and trembling and ghostlike. As if there was only one real thing about him right now and he had chosen to give it to me. To use it against me. Against himself.

I felt tears gathering at the back of my own eyes, closing up my throat, and I hurriedly swallowed them down even as he pulled back and pushed in again. Not as deeply, this time, but harder. And then, as if he couldn't hold himself back any more, couldn't make himself wait, he tightened his arm around my waist, lifted me up a little higher, and began thrusting in earnest.

And each shove inward was a blow, a hurt in the making, quick and rough and desperate, but one that drove a spike of pleasure through me as much as pain. That seemed to be pounding right down into the root of my own erection, making each subsequent impact of the tender and naked head of my cock across the bedsheet a razor-sweet and deadly pink candy explosion in the making.

He quickened and slowed and then quickened again and I could feel sweat dripping down on me now, dark sweat, and the trembling in his body increasing even as his cock seemed to grow hotter inside me. More rigid. Impossibly hard. Pounding down into me with such force I could only imagine that he was pouring more into it than simple desire. Sharing with me, instead, all the twisted pressure of his internal conflicts, of a want too long unanswered. Unacknowledged.

As if it truly was a civil war he was fighting these days, need against need, brother to brother. A war that left him all black and blue and grey, bruised and drained and dreaming of death. Denied by God and country, and even more so denying of his own heart and desire. A war he must know he could never survive, win or lose. That, maybe, just maybe, he didn't want to survive.

I pushed back against him and let him pull me into the battle with him, let him tear me as he was torn. My whole groin hot with blood, my skin stretched near to the breaking point. My legs trembling against his and a deep hollowness and shaking inside me growing stronger with each stroke. And I could see, could almost taste the place he seemed to be trying to reach and it was full of a darkness that was perhaps mute cousin to my own emptiness. One that longed to be touched, to be filled as much as it feared it as well. And I couldn't stop the gasps anymore, couldn't stop one or two tears escaping as he slammed into me over and over again, sliding in transparent slickness and wet salt and white pearling hunger.

Pushing me close and closer to my own fears and need.

My own cock was fire now too and when his hand moved down to grasp it, to cage it, I almost lost it right then and there. Only his cool fingers held me back, knotting themselves ruthlessly around the base of my cock and denying me my release, trading the sudden surge of pleasure for one of an agony almost as intense.

And as if he hadn't proved himself enough of a bastard already, he shifted himself on top of me and the next thrust slid right across that magic button inside me. His fingers tightening at almost the same damn time, as if to contain the impact where it would do the most good. Or the most damage, considering. And it wasn't fireworks, this time, or a scattering of stars, but a full-fledged artillery shell. A canon ball slamming into me and knocking me clean off my feet. Clean out of my mind.

"Fuck! Shit!" I heard someone swear on some distant other battlefield.

Then knew it was me when he did it again and again. Hitting me smack-dab and pop-goes-the-weasel every last time. And if he hadn't gotten me pinned down so damn effectively, I would have turned around and popped him a good one just to make him stop. Or to make him finish it forthwith, to finish me before the top of my head blew clean off and that was that, Immortal or not.

I was on the verge of pleading with him--if only I could find my voice, let alone figure out how the hell to use it--when he seemed to get caught up in it himself. He arched his entire body up over the top of me and lost both rhythm and precision at the same time. The next few strokes going deep, going hard, going fast, his hips slam-jamming into me, all bone and sweat and straining tendon. His breathing turning just as chaotic, the fingers clenched around my wrist digging in to the point of cutting off every last bit of circulation.

But he must have been aware enough to realize that his time was near, because he abruptly let go of the base of my cock and pumped me instead, just a few strokes but merciless in their exactness. A knowing touch, one that send me right up to the edge almost instantly, frighteningly quickly...

And then, hardly before I could draw another breath, I was beyond it and that same lightning, that same choking-black powder and explosive compression was flooding me and my face was wet and I couldn't breathe, couldn't see, couldn't think. Couldn't do anything but push downwards into that rough grip and feel him slam himself full down into the depths of me one last time, doing the same.

Filling me with another explosion, one that smoothed out the edges of my own. That sent bright little tingles of light and heat all through me and made my cock twitch one last time. Then I collapsed down into the mattress and he collapsed on top of me, damp and heavy and struggling for air of his own. No longer cold, but nearly as heated as the cock still buried inside me.

I pulled on my bound wrist and, almost reluctantly, or as if only now realizing he was still holding it, he let go of it. Started to withdraw his hand. But I turned my own hand and grasped it, clasped those fingers and intertwined them with my own. And was rewarded by a kiss dropped down onto my shoulder, butterfly-soft and just as tentative, before he laid his head down once more. Before he gave my cock another couple of strokes with his other hand, gentler now, but still wringing a couple of more surges of spastic pleasure out of me. A tiny buck of my hips that he answered with one of his own.

We laid like that for a long time, or at least long enough for the moon to pass behind the clouds once more. It's going seemed to draw the night back close about us and it was a lonely feeling as much as it was a comforting one. It was then that I heard his breathing changing, catching and quickening slightly, and felt his cock hardening again inside me. Not like it had been before, but hard enough.

"Alex...?" I whispered his name, and he answered with another. Not mine, but I didn't mind.

And then he started moving again and this piercing was, if anything, sweeter still. My skin was still so tender, so sensitive to the touch that I felt as if I could feel every bit of him, every last inch, as he slid in and out on the strength of his own emissions. It was a warm and almost tender possession this time, slow and deep and dreamy, and it soon brought an answering heat rising back up inside me. Made me close my fingers tight around his and pull myself up to meet those strokes. To meet him.

And more so than before, I knew this wasn't for me. Wasn't about me. But I didn't care. Couldn't care.

Or, at least, wouldn't allow myself to. I knew the deal before I cut the cards and I couldn't quit now, no matter that I could see how much it might hurt in the long run. And when you're an Immortal the long run is a very long time, indeed.

So I ignored the kisses he set into the back of my neck, the soft and shuddering gasp of the name that followed, a jewel for those self-same kisses. Ignored the first faint flush of my own regrets and concentrated, instead, on my own slowly reviving cock. On the pure and liquid pleasure he was giving me with the grace of each long thrust into my body. Relaxing into this one moment locked up tight in the night and into each other and on my search, once more, for that glorious point of ecstasy.

Golden and sunlit as a pair of hazel eyes. Or green.

Though not as breathtakingly elusive.

It didn't take as long this time, but then I didn't think I could have stood it anyway. When he clasped me hard to him, I knew it was over and I met the last few thrusts with a sigh and a submission. A quicksilver heat spreading all through me as I deliberately tightened my inner muscles around him and felt him jump and push one more time in response. As I felt a soft surge deep inside me, rippling out like wind across still water. Filling me once more. Making my own cock tighten and swell a little more in response.

He held himself there for a long moment afterwards, before finally raising himself up off the top of me. I had to bite back a sound of protest as he slid himself free at the last, burying my face deeper into the sheet beneath me as I felt the emptiness he'd left behind. One that had come to fit him so perfectly.

Ah, shit... this I hated...

I closed my eyes a second, then opened them and forced myself to let go of his hand, to start to move away from him, but he caught me and guided me to turn over instead. To lay back flat on the bed and face him, even though he was hardly more than a shadow in the dark. I felt his seed trickling down and out of me even as he bent to kiss me. Once on the space just between my eyes and once on my mouth, a chaste kiss almost, not hard, but not much more than that.

He sat back then, leaving one hand curved lightly across my collar bone, and shook his head slightly.

"You play a dangerous game," he said, his tone flat. Reclaimed. Utterly expressionless.

I found a shrug somewhere within me. "There's any other kind?"

A long silence followed, during which that hand moved, fingers smoothing over the bone, an almost forgotten gesture. "You have a point," he replied at last. "Though, I suppose if you can't die..."

He trailed off. I thought about reminding him that there were other--maybe, even worse--things to be lost than life. That death, itself, could sometimes be the easier choice. But I said nothing. This night and this coupling had been my idea and I had no one to blame but myself if I'd ended up shooting myself in the foot over it. If I'd added one more sorrow to my long dreams of grief.

And you thought I had none? That nothing could touch me, let alone come to haunt my nights? Those I don't manage to fill with enough light or booze or acclaim to deceive myself. Well, that's as may be... but if you did then you're just another fool, as much a fool maybe as the two of them. Life hurts us all. I just party a little harder to try and forget about it. And who the hell can fault me for that?

Not you, my boy. Not you.

And not him, my darkest twin. Though not by much, if one really wants honesty. The unflattering little thing that it is.

"No," I said. "I can't die--not by a bullet anyway. By rope or by fire or water or even a sudden deadly blow to the neck."

Those fingers stilled and I realized they had come to rest on just that exact spot. "No?" he echoed, his voice turning suddenly soft. Sibilant. "There's other ways to kill, you know. Or to die..."

My pulse sounded in my ears as he pressed in slightly, then slid his hand away once more. Skimming down over the length of my body until he found another pulsepoint. One that had grown back to nearly its full state.

"Did you think I would leave you...?" he asked, and there was an unspoken "like this" at the end of his sentence.

"I don't expect anything," I said, repeating my earlier words. That ones that had already gotten me killed once tonight. "I just hope."

"Fucking idiot," he said this time instead of offing me, and then he closed his hand on my cock and moved down to take it into his mouth. No fooling. No hesitation. Just one gulp and there it was, down his throat as far as it could go. As a talent, I much preferred this one to his habit of turning himself off, but then maybe it was just an extension of not caring, after all. In this case, about the simple task of breathing.

My cock didn't care about suffocating him, though. And after a few long, slow and exceedingly hard pulls that felt like he was trying to suck it clean off, I didn't much care, either. His mouth was so hot, so deep, so very determined. As if he was applying his greatest concentration to it, to what he was doing. Sparing only an afterthought for the icing on the cake--a slip of the other hand down below to cup and fondle my balls with a grip hardly less gentle and altogether possessive.

Ah, let me tell you, there is a kind of sultry sweetness to a good blowjob, especially with someone who knows what to do with their tongue. I had to fight to keep my hips on the mattress as he began to lick me up and down, pausing a few times to polish the exposed head of my cock. To nibble lightly at the turtleneck it usually wore. But that was just a brief interlude of play and, pleasurable as it was, he soon settled back down to business.

He pushed my legs wider apart and dug his fingers into my thighs, pinning me to the bed. Holding me immobile. Helpless. Working me with an increasingly wicked tongue, stealing every single drop of liquid he could tease out of me. Like he'd been starving for a long time.

And I swear it'd been the same for me. Though, of course, it hadn't. But as I watched that dark head bobbing on me and couldn't keep myself from surrendering farther and farther to the wet heat it was generating, it was as if it had been decades. Ages, even. Forever, or as near to it as I'd ever come.

I felt like I was being wound up like a spring as well, tighter and tighter, or like one of those toys with the key in its back and a foolish grin on its broad painted face. And, this time, I couldn't speak at all, couldn't make a sound. Even though I could feel it backing up in my chest, at my throat, all those little sounds of pleasure gathering themselves up into one solid knot. Making it increasingly hard to breathe.

I let my head fall back and looked up at the ceiling, at the long fingers of moonlight as they began to creep back into the room. There were patterns there, interlocking and beautiful, but I couldn't make them make sense. Though, some part of me felt as if I should. As if I could. But then even that thought fell to pieces as he rolled the head of my cock between his lips and stuck an insolent tip of tongue into the slit along the top, as if what I was already giving him wasn't proving to be enough. As if he wanted to devour it more directly, to consume me right down to the core.

I tried to rise to the occasion, but he pressed me back down hard into the bed. Forcing me to take it on his terms. Forcing his control on me. And my cock was sweltering and swollen in his mouth, the pleasure almost incandescent now, the flush spreading rapidly up from my groin. Making it almost impossible to feel anything else, let alone to care.

My hips bucked again before I could remember why I should stop them and, this time, he almost couldn't keep them down. The head of my cock skidded loose across the top of his mouth and he caught it at the last second with the bare edge of his teeth. It hurt and an honest-to-goodness gasp escaped me before my throat closed up again. As if in apology, he immediately swallowed the entire length of me back down, then shifted up a bit and began moving up and down on me--throat to lips and back to throat, quick and hard, his tongue rubbing up along first one side and then the other. And I could feel that spring about to go and I didn't want it to go and I couldn't stand for it not to and I somehow managed to raise my head yet again and wasn't surprised to see the hard glint in his eyes as he looked back at me in that same exact instant. Something seemed to pass between us in that moment--I'm still not sure exactly what--and then those eyes narrowed, turning even harder, almost metallic they were so flat, and he lowered his head once more and took me down deep a couple of more times and now it was more than going. It was gone and I was gone and the moonlight was clawing at my eyes, far too bright, far too silent, and that great knot had finally come undone and I was screaming. Screaming as that pent-up heat surged up and began pouring out of me, pouring into him, and I could dimly feel him drinking it down and that made it all the better, each compulsive gulp sending another jagged spike of light searing back through me.

Then, as I thought I was going to just damn well melt right away right there, it released me as swiftly as it had captured me. And I fell and fell hard, my whole body tingling, feeling torn at the seams and washed out deep down inside and almost wincing away from the last couple of laps of the other man's tongue as he collected a few drops that must have dared to try and escape him.

I closed my eyes and let out a long sigh of air, took in some that wasn't quite so rarefied.

"You're welcome," came a soft voice still hovering in the region of my groin. Fingers peeled themselves slowly off the skin of my thighs, but I found I hadn't the strength, let alone the pretense towards modesty to bother closing them again.

But it didn't seem to matter; he simply climbed back up me and settled down on my full length and looked into my eyes from just a few inches away. He was warm all over now, almost as hot as I felt, as if sucking me off had done as much for him as it had for me. Maybe more.

"That was..." I said between gulps of my own. "A bit of... all right."

His expression didn't change, but his eyes sparkled a little, I swear. Or maybe it was just the lingering after effects making me hallucinate.

"Does that mean I still get the car?" he asked.

"Fuck," I replied. "I'd give you the house... if it was mine to give. The keys... to the liquor cabinet."

"Didn't need em," he replied, his tone bland.

"The Chivas?" I asked.

"The Chivas."

"Good taste."

He ran a quite deliberate lick of tongue across his lips. "Yeah."

A little stitch of amusement unraveled inside me. I lifted a hand and ran it down his side, slicking across smooth skin and drying sweat. He raised his head slightly in response and one of his own hands slowly moved to cup the back of my neck. I was forced to suppress a shiver at the feel of those hard fingers resting there, even though there was no way he could have realized. That he could know it was the only truly vulnerable point on an Immortal.

It made the moment when he bent down those last inches and kissed me immeasurably tender, a fragile and reckless thing. And it was a warm kiss, too, one that belied the nature of the man on top of me, that denied his reserve and his ruthless nature. Not an affectionate kiss--I wouldn't go so far and doubted he would either--but... warm.

When he finally pulled back again, I knew it was over, though, that he was about to pull back all the way. To roll off of me and away. To close up again. To leave. So I tightened my own grip and said something really stupid.

"You should tell him, Alex. Life is short. Don't waste it."

He didn't blink, though he paused in his retreat.

"I didn't ask for your advice." Husky, but cold. So cold.

I kept my own tone light somehow, the only way I could ask for a modicum of forgiveness. "No. But you should take it. I have been around the block a few times, after all."

"Yeah?" The ice melting a little, at least around the edges. "How many times?"

"That would be telling." Not that I wasn't tempted, but information is power, isn't that what they say. "But why don't you go right ahead. Ask Agent Mulder. When you see him."

Frost-bite city again. "Before or after he tosses my ass in jail?"

"Oh, I don't know," I replied. "I think he has something far better in mind for your ass than that."

For a long moment--almost uncomfortable, even for me--he searched my eyes. And his own eyes were no longer opaque, but liquid, clear and bottomless as a pool of still water. It was an effort not to simply fall right down into them. To be lost and drowned by their depths, by their coolness and their promise, a soft and subtle and dreamless death. Finally, though those eyes shuttered themselves again and he raised himself up and away from me. I let him go, this time, since I could all but feel the tension returning to his form. Knowing it to be only one short step away from violence. But he didn't leave, just laid back on the bed next to me and let out a long breath of his own. Not quite a sigh, but close.

Slowly, I rolled to my side and elbow. He wasn't looking at me, but I looked at him, running an approving eye up and down his body, lingering the longest on the cock lying so peaceably now across one hard thigh. Sated and still faintly flushed, I had an almost irrepressible urge to pet it, not that it wouldn't likely get my hand bitten clean off in the process.

"Not that I can blame the man," I commented softly. "It is a fine specimen as asses go. Much like my own, you might even say."

I swear his mouth twitched a little.

"Still," I went on, taking it as encouragement. "I think he'd prefer yours to mine any day. If given the chance."

"The one you think I should give him." Rough and yet so tranquil at the same time, but which one was the lie?

"Yeah," I answered, then rolled over to my own back, looked back up at the ceiling and mutely wished Gwen had gotten around to installing that mirror we'd talked about once. Not that I had to see the man next to me in order to feel the space between us expanding, those few inches growing ever more distant, turning into a minefield. "But then what do I know? Better safe than sorry, isn't that the philosophy you believe in? Isn't that what keeps you alive? Just doing what you have to. Just saving your skin."

"And what's wrong with that?"

"Nothing," I replied. "Nothing at all."

I felt him shift on the bed and knew he was sitting up. Perhaps even sitting on the edge of the bed, on the verge of walking out. Still, I could sense his eyes on me. Could feel the weight of an appraisal as frank as the one I'd just given him.

"Mulder must be losing his touch," he said quietly, almost as if to himself. "If he actually thought you were me, if even for a little while."

I closed my eyes, then opened them again and turned my head to look at him. His eyes came up and met mine and they were subdued now, neither masked nor open, but something caught in-between. Betraying an honest hint of puzzlement, even of hurt. A hurt I doubted he was entirely aware of.

"I didn't..." I said, then swallowed back the rest. "I'm sorry. Maybe I should have tried harder to dissuade him of the notion."

I was half expecting him to be angry, but he just lowered his eyes and shook his head. "I'm not surprised. It's hard to convince Agent Mulder of anything he's already made up his mind about."

"The voice of experience?"

Something unsettled flickered across his face and then was gone. "Let's just say we've gone around the block a few times, too."

I thought about apologizing--both for the current situation and for the earlier one with FBI--but could find neither the words nor the energy inside me to do it. It'd been a long day and an even longer night and getting my rocks off twice in such a short period of time was making me increasingly sleepy.

He must have been tired, too, but I wasn't going to bring that up either.

Instead, I went back to gazing up at the ceiling, as if it were the most fascinating thing in the room. "Well, Alex," I said, and could hear that same sleepiness creeping in. "Like I said, you're welcome to stay or go as you please. Tonight. Tomorrow. Whenever." There was no response, so I forged on, hearing my voice getting softer and softer. "Gwen'll be back Monday, but I'm sure she won't mind. Whether you swing that way or if you don't. Oh yeah, we got a hot tub out back. Room enough for six, so that's okay, too."

There was no answer for a long time--so long I thought there wasn't going to be--and if he was still breathing I certainly couldn't hear it, so I gradually felt myself surrendering to the drift of my eyelids. Undoubtedly, it was a dangerous act to contemplate, even after what had just happened between us. Maybe even because of it. If he hadn't figured out the trick to killing me, he could still inconvenience me; I didn't relish the thought of waking up in some sodden grave in the woods or as hearty man's entree in the chest freezer in the basement or even locked in the trunk of my faithful Charger. No matter the case of champagne that still remained there to comfort me while I waited for my girl to get home and get around to releasing me.

But he did none of those things.

Instead, I finally half-heard, half-sensed him finally get up and leave the room. Listened to the faint and increasingly dreamy sound of running water starting up a little while later. And I must have fallen asleep at some point before he was done, because when I woke again it was to sunlight pouring into the room rather than moonlight and I could remember bits and flashes of the strangest assortment of dreams. One of which involved a shower and the nutcase from "Psycho," only he hadn't come after me with a knife and when I'd opened my mouth to scream he'd kissed me and it hadn't been Norman Bates at all, just a guy wearing a mask to look like him, and I couldn't mistake those green eyes, not in a million years, and he'd pushed me down to my knees in the tub and...

What do you know, my glass needs a refill again. Would you mind? Thanks so much. 'S good, isn't it? So good.

Well, he was gone, of course, I have to tell you. Long gone. And if the other bed had been slept in at all, I certainly couldn't tell. It had been made up perfectly, as if he wanted me to bounce quarters off of it or something, and even the still faintly damp towels he'd left behind in the bathroom were neatly folded and hung to within an inch of their lives.

I stared at them for a time, then stared at myself in the mirror, and wondered that it didn't show. The acute disappointment I was feeling. And the relief. But then my eyes weren't nearly so bottomless as his, let alone half as hard. We may have looked alike--closer even than brothers--but I was an Immortal and he... wasn't. That was all. One incontrovertible difference that made all the difference in the world. If I'd gotten to him, gotten him to stay, I would have to watch him die whether it was tomorrow or fifty years from tomorrow. Knowing the whole time that I really had no say in which it would be. That I couldn't. No matter that I wanted to.

Wanted him.

But let's haul out that brutal honesty one last time, shall we? Let the champagne go straight to my head. Loosen my tongue, as if it needed any encouragement. Maybe, if you want the truth, it was more like part of me wanted to be him. Whether just for tomorrow or for those fifty short fucking years. And that's why I wanted to take him home and fuck him so very badly. And maybe that's why I don't stay with mortals or let myself get too attached to them, any of them--not because they end up dying, but because I envy them so damn much. Their bright and bitter lives. Like a moth to the flame, burnt up by the very attraction of the thing. By their love for it.

Oh, I've touched that fire a few times, but damned if I can keep hold of it. Maybe, no Immortal can. Not really. But since you're a guest, I'll be considerate and just speak for myself, okay? I'll be the one to admit that, much as I'm drawn to that fire, I fear it just as much. And that's it's a right bitch sometimes, swinging back and forth that way, caught between running head-on and hurdy gurdy straight to it and... simply running away. My own personal pendulum, you could say. Not that walking that edge sometimes can't be fun. A riot even.

A real kick in the balls...

But, hell, who understands that but me? Mac certainly doesn't. Not to mention that Mac would just about hate this guy. Maybe even more than he dislikes me and my lifestyle choices and that's saying a lot. Fuck, at least Amanda would consider the poor boy and I an embarrassment of riches, and one that she more than wickedly deserved. She'd have had somebody in to install a mirror over the bed first thing. Well, maybe, second thing. Or third or fourth--there is the hot tub to consider.

Anyway, I took a shower of my own before I wandered downstairs. Used the same towels he used and hung them back up not near as neatly. And found he'd not only somehow managed to leave the security system activated behind him, but a full pot of fresh brewed coffee as well, the delicious devil. Just the smell alone was enough to make my eyes unpeel those last couple of centimeters, to make me half-way able to convince myself that I really was flirting with consciousness.

I poured myself a cup, compromising it with lots of sugar and a dash of cream and cinnamon, and took a long sip before wandering back out into the main room. Nothing else had changed or been altered; I could see the Charger as I paused in front of one of the windows, glowing like a cup of spilled wine in the late morning sunlight. It made me wonder if he'd actually taken the BMW, but I didn't feel like even going back out to the kitchen to check and see if the keys were gone. Not that a man like that would actually need them.

That he would actually admit to needing much of anything. At least, by the light of day. To a total stranger. Even one who wore his face, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Or even that of another.

In the dark.

Finally, I moved away from the window and sat on the same stool I'd forced him to sit on. Drank my coffee and contemplated Gwen's painting--the woman and the swan and the swan and the woman--and the mirror of water that lay between them. Contemplated the thought that he hadn't bothered to kill me again and that I'd gone to sleep in a stripped bed and had woken up bundled under sheets and blankets as if nothing of what happened between us had really happened. Except maybe in my dreams. Or in his.

But, most of all, I contemplated the almost painful loveliness of a pair of hazel eyes and of green, and whether or not they would ever come to see that self-same loveliness in each other. Rather than just the pain. 'Cause, even I gotta admit, odds are that they won't ever figure it out. That they'd much rather stay in where it's safe, each in their paranoid little world, than to take that bonzo risk and go for the gold, for the big payoff. The flashing lights and screaming sirens and all your cherries lined up in row.

But you play it safe like that and you end up with nothing, except being fucked up...

You see, I know. 'Cause much as Lady Luck's in my back pocket and much as I've jumped in front of countless guns, without a thought, without a care, that's me, boyo. Playing it safe. In all the ways that really count, anyhow.

And that's him, all fire and ice, my poor little mortal bad boy self. And that's even mister sharper-than-sharp-hazel-eyes-no-sense-of-humor-FBI-guy too, for ya.

All. Fucked. Up.

But, hey, don't let me get you down. That's not what we're here for and, yeah, you heard me right and that's an innuendo that'll definitely bite you in the ass if you're not careful. Not that I figure you've got much use for what other people think anymore than I do. I may not have as much time under my belt--just a flash in the pants, you might say, compared to you--but even I know morals change almost as much as hemlines. One year, what's out is in and the next what's in is out... and can I set that glass aside for you? Just for a moment or two. While we get a shade more comfortable here.

Wouldn't do to spill it by accident after all. Not a good vintage like that. If you can say that champagne actually has a vintage. Champagne, or other things.

And, yeah, I know you really don't like me much--if at all--but just let me hit this switch here and put out those big nasty lights and then we'll be in the dark at last, all warm and cozy and proper, just us cats here. Grey as all get out.

Hmmm...? Oh yeah, Alex. Well, I guess that's pretty much the end of the story. And, no, I haven't seen him since. But then I haven't exactly been straining myself with looking. After all, I figure he deserves that chance even if he doesn't end up taking it, or if he ends up blowing it. Rather than blowing him. Whatever. I mean, fuck, the world could end before they get it on like they really should. Or one or both turn up dead. Tomorrow or anytime in those fifty remaining years getting doled out to them.

Not that he doesn't owe me. A car, at the very least. And not that I wouldn't consider another turn in the sack in lieu of actual cash payment on said car. Or in addition to. Being a greedy bastard on rare occasion.

I guess, if you really wanta hear it, I'm running, too. And only time will tell in which direction. Or whose face I'll end up wearing next. Blue or grey, what does it really matter? One's as good as the other.

Isn't it?

Adam?


End file.
